Fusion-io breaks out roomy, nimble ioDrive Duo SSDs

While it's going to be tough for Fusion-io to get its ioDrive any faster in the near term, it ain't so tough to make the world's fastest storage more capacious. Shortly after pulling The Woz in as its chief scientist, said outfit has just revealed the next-generation ioDrive, predictably coined ioDrive Duo. The PCI Express-based solution throws 160GB, 320GB, 640GB or 1.28TB of stupid fast SSD storage directly onto your motherboard, enabling it to boast sustained read bandwidth of 1,500MB/sec and write bandwidth of 1,400MB/sec. The smallest three will be available next month for prices we don't even want to guess, while the 1.28TB model is slated to ship shortly after OCZ's 1TB Z Drive in the latter half of 2009.

[Via HotHardware]

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 4:58PM]

Can someone say nerdgasm?

[Derek Kessler Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:01PM]

This really never happens you can take my word
I won't apologize, that's just absurd
Mainly your fault from the way that you dance
and now I..

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:04PM]

if it reads 1400MB/sec, and holds 1.28TB of data, does that mean it can blow its load in under 1 second?

[Techie Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:05PM]

I think I just JIZZ IN MY PANTS

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:07PM]

If i plotted a graph of public exposure (days) to lyric quotation in forums and general conversation (unit..?), it would look like this.


|
| x Champs Elysee
|
| x Under the sea
|
| x Jizz in my pants
________________________________________________________
quotations

[Ken J Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:14PM]

"if it reads 1400MB/sec, and holds 1.28TB of data, does that mean it can blow its load in under 1 second"

1400MB = 1.4 GB not TB

so it essentially "blows its load" at just over 15 minutes

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:17PM]

1400MB/sec not 1400GB/sec... 1.28TB = 1310GB = 1342000 MB roughly

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 7:51PM]

$80/GB

The Mac version will be $180/GB

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 12:23AM]

Everytime I see this card I...

Jizz in my pants

[barCODE Posted Mar 12th 2009 1:13AM]

Yes you can, but is that a set of SAS connectors on that card?

[dcaudillo Posted Mar 12th 2009 9:54AM]

Just incase someone isn't understanding why everyone is "jizzing in their pants" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4&feature=PlayList&p=5A9C50B207ADC1E0&index=0&playnext=1

[SirNoDroin Posted Mar 11th 2009 4:59PM]

Oh! I want...but probably 3 years and double the price for the mac version ;)

[wcanyon Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:28PM]

Welp, you gotta pay for Steve-O to be cryogenically frozen somehow.

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:32PM]

Lets hope apple dont make the chamber, or it will overheat and the video card will bug out... oh my analogy joke train slipped of its metaphorical tracks.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:05PM]

Forget ludicrous speed. We need to go right to stupid speed.

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:00PM]

These are completely going to replace drive form factors.

I call for a rewrite of the whole system, you have a motherboard, which is mainly just busses and voltage regulators etc.
Then a CPU/Northbridge card, RAM card, Storage Card, Graphics Card, Ethernet, Wireless etc.

I know it wont ever happen, but i can dream..

[MioTheGreat Posted Mar 11th 2009 6:21PM]

"but I can dream"

Sounds more like a nightmare to me.

/Electrical engineer

[paul34 Posted Mar 11th 2009 8:48PM]

Storage card is no good. It would be far better to make it a type of removable card, like a hot swapple hard drive, but more user friendly and with a universal spec (computer noobs can't change hard drives currently even though its as easy as plugging in your toaster... but they can usually operate a DVD drive. Same thing should go with storage drives).

[maveric101 Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:03PM]

i wish i had the cash to build a beast rig with one of these. use this for the main drive (OS), and some hard drives in raid 5 for general storage.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 9:16PM]

These can't be booted from.

[ShinseiRyu Posted Mar 11th 2009 9:43PM]

I don't see why you can't boot from one of these. Some net-books have a PCI-E based disk drive and they boot from them just fine. You can boot off raid controllers so what would be the difference with this one?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 1:42AM]

Of course you can boot from these.
It's just like booting from a PCIe RAID card except in this case the drives are on the card itself.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 3:06AM]

except for the part where your pcie raid card has a bios and this doesn't, yet

[maveric101 Posted Mar 12th 2009 3:21AM]

a single hard drive doesn't have a BIOS either. a RAID card needs the software to work with multiple drives. these would be just like using a regular drive, except with a different connection method (oh, and it's a fuckload faster, too). next goal is to put these in RAID 0... O_O

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:06PM]

AHH! Cool!
PCI right?

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:08PM]

PCIe x1?

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:15PM]

PCIe x4 and x8 apparently..

im still getting used to PCIe...

[djmere Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:11PM]

awww skeeet skeeet!!!

[Fanfoot Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:13PM]

But these don't make sense in the enterprise. In the enterprise they have 12 and 24-drive bay rack mount computers with LOTS of disk slots in 3RU and 4RU sizes, and not that many PCIe slots. So sure you could spend tons of money on a couple of these, but you could also just buy a whole freaking load of regular disk-shaped SSDs and run them in parallel. As you saw from the post the other day, you can hit 6GB/sec with enough 2.5" Samsung SSDs. These cards have something like 6X the bandwidth of an Intel X25E. Which is great for a consumer installation, except that a consumer can't afford it, and probably doesn't need it. For enterprise? Why would anybody buy this?

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:17PM]

I think this is not actually a real aim to transform the enteprise market. This will be taken up by consumers (i would buy a 160Gb if the price was right, less than £400). I think this is an effort to show their potential.

[219 Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:40PM]

This is aimed squarely at HD video editing, large-format graphic design, anywhere large files are being opened, edited, and saved often. This could shave hours off video editing per week, which makes it completely worthwhile.

[pretol Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:52PM]

This is not for a server or backup applications.

This is squarely aimed at a high-performance workstation (or a super-duper expensive gaming rig)...

Photo-editing (professional, 50mp kinda stuff), video editing/processing, 3-d modeling... Anything with large file size processing involved...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 7:49PM]

Unless they are using 1U or blade servers. Plus, if you sit on the system with simple software you can talk directly with anything else on the system bus (network adapters, host bus adapters, graphics co-processors, iSCSI adapters, etc.).

Why not use your drive bays for large 1TB capacity drives?

[technokimchi Posted Mar 11th 2009 8:51PM]

Hey fanfoot,

What's the model number of the Samsung SSD you mention; I'm living in Korea so I may be able to get one of these on the cheap.

Storage solutions are becoming the new graphics cards.

Thanks

[Fanfoot Posted Mar 11th 2009 9:12PM]

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/24-samsung-ssds-get-strung-together-for-supercomputer-fun/

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 11:54AM]

These have plenty of uses in the enterprise environment. Disk IO is a big bottleneck when your trying to virtualize many systems on a small cluster of 1U servers. If you can't afford $20k for a good fiber channel SAN, then maybe buying a few of these would be a cheaper solution.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 14th 2009 6:55PM]

Fanfoot wrote:
>But these don't make sense in the enterprise. In the enterprise they have
>12 and 24-drive bay rack mount computers with LOTS of disk slots in 3RU
>and 4RU sizes, and not that many PCIe slots.

A standard 4U Supermicro X7DWE (for example) has four PCIe x8 (Gen2) slots and one PCIe x4. That's small Enterprise.

An 8U HP DL785G5 has 11 sots >=x4. That's Enterprise class.

... and the ioDrives scale Linearly (i.e. 6GB/s random reads w/ four ioDuos in the X7DWE x8 slots... try getting that performance out of your attached SAN/NAS/JBOD).

So, they don't make sense in Enterprise, if Enterprise doesn't have a need for fast storage.

[Fredgeot Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:16PM]

this means i could move my porn at lightning fast speeds?

[CheesusCrust Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:21PM]

Why? Are you trying to hide it from someone? We all know you know.

[paul34 Posted Mar 11th 2009 8:50PM]

Seriously. Backing up my collection takes FOREVER. And I have a RAID 0 setup, some good that does...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:19PM]

If the lowest capacity version is cheap enough, $250ish, I'd get one. Put the OS on it and turn the 750 I got into a storage only drive.

[SirNoDroin Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:24PM]

considering a 160 gig 2.5'' SSD is about 550+ dollars for the current form factor...I'm going to guess the low end of these puppies will be AT LEAST 700 bucks...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:28PM]

Really!?!

Pass!

[Fanfoot Posted Mar 11th 2009 9:13PM]

Uhh guys, the previous generation 80GB product was $3000.00 in December of last year.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1683/1/exclusive_look_at_fusion_io_iodrive_pcie_solid_state/index.html

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 3:09AM]

hp is selling the version that goes in their C class blades as of Monday last week. the 80GB one of those is around $4k with a decent discount.

[hajj3 Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:31PM]

would like to see the 160gb price. I'm guessing £600

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:33PM]

Um, the previous generation 80GB version was $3000...Read the other links in the article.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:39PM]

I'm not sur eif theyve remedied the situation yet but the previous version of these drives could not be booted from, as they do not use a conventional storage bus connection i.e. SATA or SAS or IDE. This means that your computer would need a new BIOS and/or OS designed to be bootable from the PCIe ports on the motherboard. Though i would'nt get your hopes up for a low price, these will probably be strictly dream build components for most consumers, with the main audience being large enterprises needing high performance drives for server usage they can afford to charge ludicrous prices.
Still, we can dream :-}

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:41PM]

Now to hack this into my wife's Eee, and she's all set! Social networking at the speed of business, baby!

[Oli D Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:55PM]

Yes, this will give you five times the internets of a regular drive.