Comments

fwtep wrote on 9/30/2007, 8:33 PM
Very cool, except that a 300 gig drive would cost $9000. From their FAQ:

Fusion-io is targeting a retail price of approximately $30 per Gigabyte for the ioDrive™.
rique wrote on 9/30/2007, 8:37 PM
Very cool but at $30 a gig it's $19,200. Yikes!
Chienworks wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:00 PM
And last i checked, flash technology is still frozen-molasses slow compared to conventional magnetic/mechanical drives. You wouldn't wanna try moving gigabytes of data in and out of it.
PixelStuff wrote on 9/30/2007, 10:51 PM
Last you checked? How long ago was that?

According to the article they are using NAND flash chips and get 800MB/sec read and 600MB/sec write speeds on those drives. I think that's a good bit better than most small RAIDs.

However, Chienworks, that's not an effort to say you are completely misinformed, because I suspect they are using some method of chip grouping to boost the speeds up that high (maybe similar to striping in a RAID). I would imagine they are using (or planning to use) the 8Gb and 16Gb chips. Those normally read at 30MB/sec. or 60MB/sec. Most hard drives don't usually go over 80MB/sec.

On the other hand, what Fusion io should do is put all those chips into a 3.5" drive enclosure and attach a SATA-II interface to it. Then we could max out our SATA bus with just 3 or 4 drives. (and who knows how much financial debt).