My question really has to be how this is going to effect the Future of SATA. Are we going to see a PCI-e based technology for the next generation of data storage technology? or are we just going to connect everything to a PCI-e slot?

Seems that part of the logic would involve imitating a PCI-express IDE/SATA Controller so the BIOS can assign LBA stuff to it... But I don't know if that would confuse windows when it sees a 'Sata controller card' but it is actually this product... hmm.

Above comment from me is referencing to how they would make the card bootable. Sigh. If only I could duck tape this to my new laptop. Well the Intel x25-m/e is good enough

Naturally, something like this is going to be very specialized. In mainstream applications, SATA is going to make the most sense. The PHY specification for SATA 6 Gb/s has already been ratified, so it's only a matter of time before the 3.0 standard starts making its way into controller cards and then chipsets. However, knowing what we know about magnetic storage and flash, you're really only going to see 6 Gb/s affect the throughput of SSDs moving forward.

Wow, its even faster than the I-RAM drive.

That's an expensive piece of hardware too, showing 3k for the 80GB version.

Maybe they can take AMDs old slogan "Smash the hourglass".

Um... 5 TB per day = 5,000 GB per day = 5,000,000 MB per day. At 600MB per second write speed, this is 8,333 seconds, or over two hours of continuous writing at maximum speed.

How does this mesh with "60 minute IOMeter benchmark run that focuses on write operations would result in wear equivalent to many weeks or months"?

Either the author is misreading "5TB" as "5GB" or misquoting "5GB" saying "5TB" per day of writes.

EricT

Um... 5 TB per day = 5,000 GB per day = 5,000,000 MB per day. At 600MB per second write speed, this is 8,333 seconds, or over two hours of continuous writing at maximum speed.

How does this mesh with "60 minute IOMeter benchmark run that focuses on write operations would result in wear equivalent to many weeks or months"?

Either the author is misreading "5TB" as "5GB" or misquoting "5GB" saying "5TB" per day of writes.

EricT

The truth is that I don't think the interface matters as long as it has no latency issues and provides the bandwidth required. Who cares if it's SATA or PCI - as long as you can boot from it, it's fast, and it's not too expensive it's a viable solution for desktop drives.

You see those IO graphs? This thing is screaming for data. I think they may have a great product on their hands if they can wedge up against SSD

Wonder if a fast RAID card with three 30GB SDDs, configured in RAID to about 80GB, would perform equally? Anyone?

It would take a lot of drives to get their IOPS but in pure MB/s you could get there with 3 Intel drives.

The Intel X25-E should really of been included. I am getting 240MB write/220MD reads along with 4800 IOPS per drive. These things are monsters and although are expensive, they are much better then then IO-Drive in the price area.

Wow... 2400$ and more.. we won't be using that anytime soon
But production price can't be that high.. it's the pricing for performance they give. So hopefully, we can expect that in out computers oh well... for about 10 years, lOL!

And I don't see Intel X25 being that much better on price.. If you do RAID, you need what.. 8-9 drives to get that much IOps? 8x500=4000$ so that's more expensive than this thing, we won't even go into the size and power consumption of 8 drives vs one half-height PCIe card.

This thing looks like a monster to me, even though I'm not professonaly into heavy server stuff.. And for the performance they are offering, it's not that terrible price either. Especialy if you work with relatively small amount of data which is accessed by a large number of clients. If you can fit any database or something similar in those ~20GB (and that's pretty large database for most uses) you'll have a screaming server with this thing..

Anyway, just blabbering here, this is good thing. And can't wait for it to drop down some 25x in price

Wow... 2400$ and more.. we won't be using that anytime soon
But production price can't be that high.. it's the pricing for performance they give. So hopefully, we can expect that in out computers oh well... for about 10 years, lOL!

And I don't see Intel X25 being that much better on price.. If you do RAID, you need what.. 8-9 drives to get that much IOps? 8x500=4000$ so that's more expensive than this thing, we won't even go into the size and power consumption of 8 drives vs one half-height PCIe card.

This thing looks like a monster to me, even though I'm not professonaly into heavy server stuff.. And for the performance they are offering, it's not that terrible price either. Especialy if you work with relatively small amount of data which is accessed by a large number of clients. If you can fit any database or something similar in those ~20GB (and that's pretty large database for most uses) you'll have a screaming server with this thing..

Anyway, just blabbering here, this is good thing. And can't wait for it to drop down some 25x in price

sorry for double posting, system said it wasn't posted the first time

what about doing a benchmark using a software ramdrive such as the one from qsoft? i am getting around 500MB/s throughput in hdtach on a 2GB partition of ram - i'd be interested to see how it compares

I thought I had read somewhere that the price had gone up closer to 5K for the small one. THat is why I referenced the Intel SLC drives as another option. Sure it may still not give quote the same IOPS bt you would get more space. I guess it boils down to price/MB or price/IOPS depending on the use.

I think the real market for something like this is not at all in desktops, but much more likely as an intermediary cache step in storage filers between memory and scsi disks. That is really the only place that can get away with costs of this magnitude in $/GB.

I'll bet this would make a sweet scratch disk for photoshop. Kind of pricey, but if you send me one I'll tell you how much I like it

This kind of performace is possible with a software cache approach from www.superspeed.com, their SuperCache 3 and RAMDISK 9 Plus products deliver 1GB+ to the allocated memory to caching the disk at a block level cache or using the RAMDISK to store data.

This is not some new idea! A far cheaper solution is to use a hardware raid controller such as a Highpoint 3510/20 or and Adaptec 5405/8505 and 4 or more smaller Samsung SLC drives in raid 0. The total cost is about $1300 dollars from the EGG. I am running such a setup with 4 drives and easily hit the numbers this Fusion-IO is hitting and can boot from it,in Windows, OS X, Linux, and a bunch of other OS's. The Samsung SLC SSD's are also rebranded and sold as AData, Gskill, and OCZ. The 32Gb version selling as low as $239 each. While MLC flash varies in performance, SLC is pretty much the same and the controller is what matters.