More info on Fusion's ioDrive, the PCIe card with massive flash storage
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted December 28th 2007 5:19PM
posted December 28th 2007 5:19PM
You may remember the lovable yet rascally ioDrive PCIe card from Fusion which we told you about back in the sun-drenched, salad days of September. Well, we've gotten a few more details on the "SAN in the palm of your hand," and we thought we'd share. As you'll recall, the card is meant to deliver very high, sustained read / write speeds, allowing the ioDrive to perform "nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive." Well, the good folks at Fusion have now given the system a price -- the card starts at $2,400 -- and offered up some fresh info, like that the ioDrive is NAND flash-based, will support multiple terabytes of virtual memory, and has access rates on par with DRAM. Which is real fast. Hit the link for a lot more info, and don't be afraid to peruse the company's .pdf data sheet.
This will go well with that skulltrail motherboard a few pages down :)
oh heck yes! That would make for quite the monster for 10,000 USD
Nice!! Now all we need is a Penryn cpu to go with the skulltrail motherboard w/ IoDrive and you could build a monster pc.
The 640 GB version costs like 30000$, and thats the only one worth getting.
In reference to the above comment
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/28/intels-newest-gaming-platform-skulltrail/
Is that PCIe 4x?
This is only for the 80Gb version as well.
Conjures up memories of those old full-length extended memory cards in the PC-XTs back in the day. :)
More vaporware. Yes I said it, what of it? :) Well it might as well be vaporware for the price.
HP seems to be on board and win 2008 will be getting support for it soon, linux will have it at ship @$2400per 80GB its a bargain
80000 iops per card and 700MBS sustained=basicly a $100,000USD SAN from HPorDELLorEMC
i expect if this works google datacenter (as well as other big guys) will be getting a few hundred terabytes of these guys, they would pay for themselves just in the power savings
Its still not vapor ware if you can buy it, even if its expensive, look at the optimus keyboard.
Vapor ware is where you announce a product, get funding, then just drop the project keeping the funding.
From the webpage:
The power of 1000 hard drives in the palm of your hand
From the FAQ:
The ioDrive™ will begin shipping in early Q1`08 in the following capacities: 80GB, 160GB, 320GB and 640GB
Sounds more like the power of one hard drive. I'll acknowledge that these things are faster than balls, but this marketing is so deceitful, it makes me think they are hiding something...
"Power" is not intended to mean "capacity." They're referring to speed not storage space.
That price is not all that bad when you consider high end workstations. We're running dual Nvidia Quadro cards which each are in that price range. When I look at the performance boost I get jumping from 7200 to 10K rpm drives and the boost from 32 to 64 bit OS (more RAM).. this makes a lot of sense if it actually works.
All I can say is WOOOOO!!!
Once the price on these things drops a little I'm gonna snag one!
Note that, according to the specification, it doesn't work under Windows. They only list Red Hat and SUSE Linux as compatible operating systems. Not sure that's a good marketing scheme.