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 7:01PM]

Well, at least she could install everything from the Xandros/Debian repositories and still have space to spare...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 2:47PM]

The Fusion-io is NOT BOOTABLE
You can only use it as a secondary drive.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 4:54PM]

[disclaimer]
The original comment contains statements that were meant jokingly. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused by taking the original comment seriously. We are well aware that, in addition to this drive not being bootable, it would be improbably, if not impossible to "hack" a PCIe SSD into an Eee PC. Thank you for your time.
[/disclaimer]

[psychoticdream Posted Mar 11th 2009 5:59PM]

WANT!!!!!!!!1

[RKN Posted Mar 11th 2009 6:18PM]

So this totally blows away the OCZ's offering in both speed and capacity right and so soon? Wow...........

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 6:34PM]

My wallet just ran away and hid from me. >.>
Still sticking to my plan of waiting for two more years for prices to come down before I upgrade my computer with a nice flash drive.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 6:48PM]

These cards are totally for the enterprise (@fanfoot). Have you ever managed a SAN? Paid for one? I could take my whole dept on vacation with the money i'd save on one of these drives and get the same data transfer. This is not meant for playing crysis... or reading your facebook page.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 7:21PM]

yeah but id pay 3000 dollars for one of these to play games on anyway.

[Fanfoot Posted Mar 11th 2009 9:15PM]

Actually, I work on video servers. But whatever...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 3:13AM]

i've heard they are working on a model aimed at high-end gamer market. no idea when that will be available tho.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 7:54PM]

It's amazing how close the performance looks on paper but Tom's Hardware did some real world testing and it would take something like 50-100 SSD's from Samsung & Mtron to match the ioDrive in real world performance, which is why companies who can afford them will buy them.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fusioinio-iodrive-flash,2140-6.html

[d3sc3nd3ncy Posted Mar 11th 2009 8:13PM]

I'd love to see the 160gb version for under 400$ if it were bootable.

[Fanfoot Posted Mar 11th 2009 9:19PM]

Once again, the 80GB version was $3000.00 in December. The 160GB will likely be at least double that. The previous gen 320GB was $14,000.

I wouldn't get your hopes up. This isn't being built for you.

[The Dead Marxist Trio Posted Mar 11th 2009 8:28PM]

Integrated graphics are getting great, and it's (hopefully) only a matter of time before we start seeing SSDs integrated onto the motherboard. It'd be awesome to have a mirrored 500GB SSD setup right on the motherboard and long with even more potent integrated graphics of tomorrow. Best netbook/top ever.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 5:18PM]

Thar she blows !! A real step-change ! That's what I was waiting for....now to wait another year for some non-silly prices...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 10:08PM]

This thing is both beautiful and extremely fascinating. I would love to get one of these to replace all the drives I've used in my prior systems. Too bad the price will be something I won't want to spend again... I spent $2 G on a RAID card and 5 SCSI drives for my last system. I'd go to $1 G for this device, but I'd rather have it for $500.

I'm in love.... this is exactly what a RAID card should offer... a local hard drive. I wonder if this device has expander ports for adding conventional drives.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 10:16PM]

After reading a bit about the company... seems that my dream of ever owning this device will not materialize... apparently they make the worlds most expensive SSD products. :o

Stil looks great though. :/

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 11th 2009 11:36PM]

There is a consumer version called the ioXtreme coming out this year and it's only going to be hundreds of dollars for an 80GB version. It's not as fast as this one but at E4All it was doing almost 700MB/s of sustained throughput.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39600/135/

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 10:04PM]

Thank you for sharing that information... under $1000 for still pretty stellar performance is quite acceptable. Wish teh thing could boot so you could just eliminate the hard drive.

[Squirrel Posted Mar 12th 2009 4:23AM]

I'd like to know if they finally managed it to get a driver-free version, so it behaves like a mass-storage device. This is needed in order to be able to boot from it (from any OS and not only the driver-supported ones).

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 2:50PM]

I talked to some HP reps yesterday as they were mentioning that there will be a custom form factor Fusion-io for the HP C-Class Blades and they confirmed it is still NOT bootable due to the drivers.

It also only works with 64bit Windows and Linux.

And a little birdie at the same presentation told me that there will be a future version of the Fusion-io that uses Intel Flash memory instead of the current Samsung design. Perhaps the one in this announcement is (Duo2) is that very product, but its hard to tell this early.

[Wwhat Posted Mar 12th 2009 7:25AM]

Since it's a device that uses pcie but isn't a graphics card I expect shops will refuse to sell it because that's a bit of a taboo, at least around these parts, to use the pcie slots? unthinkable!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 11:13AM]

As amazing as the ioDrives are, it's still priced like it's the only game in town. You'd think they would be pricing it more aggressively to gain market share while there still aren't that many competing products available.

[excelsium Posted Mar 12th 2009 12:29PM]

The life of the creative just got a lot easier :)

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 2:53PM]

Only if "The Creative" use 64bit Windows Server or Linux.

90% of the Comments in this thread seem to imply people want to stick these in their laptop or desktop computer.

People need to understand this is a SERVER product and is not meant to be used by Desktops/Laptops/Netbooks

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 2:55PM]

OK So I was slightly wrong. They do support Vista x64 as well.
http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion_ioDriveDuo_datasheet_v1.pdf
But I doubt your going to put a $4000 Fusion-io (80GB) into your $2000 computer.
and most certainly not the $8000/$15000 (160/320) model either.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 4:25PM]

Can I ask a stupid question? Well I am anyway... can I run my os on this, or is it just for storage?