Fatal1ty teams with Fusion-io to launch 80GB ioXtreme PCI Express SSD
By Darren Murph 
posted June 6th 2009 11:29PM
posted June 6th 2009 11:29PM
posted June 6th 2009 11:29PM
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ahem...
I believe I speak for everyone when I say...
WTF $895 DOLLARS?!? WAY TO KILL THE GENERAL CONSUMER!
Who else makes a PCI Express SSD card?
Are there any other ones to compare to pricewise?
@Scrip- right so why don't they just go ahead and charge 2 or 3x as much because there's no competition. Don is right, it's way too much.
I really don't see why this tech would be so expensive...
PCI express tech has been around for a while. Simply adding in some SSD shouldn't jack it up that much. And for only 80gb?
Someones gotta pay for all that marketing. Lol. Fatal1ty!!!! OOOOHHHHH it's SOOOOOO FAAAAAAAASSSSTTTTTTTTT MYYYYY KEEEEYYYYBOOOOOOARRRRRDDDD ISSSSSSSS out of control. Sorry about that. My AT keyboard did not know what to do. :(
"“Johnathan’s experience with high-end computing has given him a unique insight into the disruption our core technology brings to all levels of computing,” said Steve Wozniak, chief scientist of Fusion-io."
Whoa, wait, did I read that right? Woz works @Fusion-Io, or just some bloke who just happens to be lucky to have the same name?
I'm pretty sure he helped create the company.
no, he recently signed on to work for them.
he didn't start it.
Unless this thing can seek faster than even the cheaper, same capacity Intel SSDs, I don't see what the huge advantage is here.
And by "seek faster" I mean negative seek times. That's right, it should be be able to execute requests from the future.
in the future booting a computer will actually just be telling the computer to process every possible calculation it will do and store it to memory.
People don't seem to get it. These aren't based of your consumer grade RAID controllers. These are essentially 1 Enterprise Level Raid Controller + Multiple SLC SSDs all in one neat package. The RAID controllers necessary to make the bandwith and latency equivelant are on their own more expensive then this. These are not geared towards consumers.
yet another piece of decent equipment ruined by the Fatal1ty label...
If any of your poor bastards (and I mean poor literally) saved up enough to buy an Intel X25-E, or a HyperOS HyperDrive 5, or this FusionIO card, you'd be embarrassed by your ignorant and harsh comments on a product you've never laid fingers on, nevermind your eyes. We use FusionIO products at our enterprise, cards like these but with built-in redundancy added, and if you had ANY clue as to what you were talking about, you'd know the comment in the article above is 110% accurate:
"...ioXtreme is an 80GB PCI Express card that should make your traditional HDD seem absolutely antiquated."
I also have dual X25-E SSD's in my PC at home, and even with RAID0, it won't outrun the FusionIO card *directly* attached to your PCIe slot (in other words, sans SATA controller). I'd have to spend an additional $500 to get a RAID card that can get even close to the FIO, and it would max out RAID card, anyway. Didn't any of you read the "Battleship MTRON" article before? If you did, you'd know the RAID controller you poor bastards have at home right now is a cheap piece of crap and not designed for performance at all -- only redundancy.
I dare anybody here to post their RAID configuration that can spit out over 500MB PER SECOND of data in under 1 microsecond of access time? Anyone? Anyone?
dude. chill. you are freaking out over nothing.
@thatrotierkid: If my cold hard truth is considered 'freaking out' to you, then you're in for a big surprise about life. BTW, exactly how do your comments contribute to the topic at hand?
Hahahahahaha,, little to much coffee? Hhahahahha ur about to blow a next gasket over hardware,,,,hahahahhahahahahahaha
"cold hard truth" hahahahahahahahahahahhaahahahahahahahahhahahahahaha!!!!!! the "cold hard truth" is ur a douche,,,, sorry man sombody had to tell you.
There are so many better things to spend money on than this. Enjoy living in your parents' basement.
US$11+ per gB? I'll stick to HDD for now.
Then you're missing the point of this product...
we realize the point, it is just totally out of reach for efficient usage of our money
>> "we realize the point, it is just totally out of reach for efficient usage of our money"
New stuff costs more... you don't have to buy it now.
Fusion-IO made a very expensive, but very fast, PCI Express SSD. In a few years, after the technology matures, and becomes cheaper... we will be better off because they spent the time to develop it.
Take CPUs for instance... They can range in price from $40 to $2500. Should Intel and AMD stop developing new processors because they cost too much at launch?
Actually it is no longer new and has been in the market for years.The SSD prices should have fallen through to a more manageable price level by now, but the manufacturers seems to be keen on keeping them on the high side.
I wonder when mere mortals like the rest of us will have access to FusionIO SSD performance.
Scratch that. How about just regular Intel SSD-level performance? Meaning, at a nice price. I'd say 1.5 - 2 years, but lots of things could change in that time, so who knows.
I would pay 250$ for a 40gB one, 255$ if it has Fatal1ty written on it.
A $225 20GB card would be better- cheap enough for people to look at it without laughing, large enough for a modern OS.
Ok, it maybe a silly question but...why can't someone make an SSD card like that with slots so that as we can afford it we can just add more SSD cards to it to make a bigger drive.
Or for that matter, why not have a multi type so we can use the cheapest options (SSD, Compact Flash, etc....)
Just a thought. :)
You already have that option, which are those flash memory that cost less than $3/GB. SSD is meant to be faster where you could install OS on it. I think flash memory is too slow to run an OS and it's only good for storage.
@sinai & chibisukee: Is that all you got? When you can't spew about the topic at hand, you spit out juvenile comments about masculinity? Impressive.
Not cheaper, or more elegant, or more practical, or less crazy, but faster:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&feature=player_embedded
Why is it not OK to release a 900 dollar storage solution? Yet it's ok to release 300 dollar motherboards for the purpose of placing 3 or 4, 400 dollar graphics cards. Really the storage system is used FAR more then the GPU in almost all cases. It's a high end product that delivers a high end expierence at a high end cost. Why are so many people acting surprised?
If SSD is meant for robustness, then what's the point of having one in a desktop? Desktop isn't meant to be portable after all.
Missed opportunity. I'd rather have a Woz edition.
I wonder how long before companies realize not a single person in the gaming community cares at all about Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel.
How fast will it load maps in WoW and how will it run Crysis?
$900 for 80 GB, and they call this consumer-friendly? Time to fire some dead weight in the product management team.
I was at E3 - and I saw the booth and demo. Pretty impressive stuff. If money is no object.... why not?
See, THIS is what I was waiting for in terms of SSD tech. I've been drooling over the ioDrive for a while, but it was the stuff of dreams. This is still too expensive, but it is a nice step forward. I'm pretty sure I'm going to skip the entire SATA II based SSD tech and wait for PCI-E based SSD's to become truely consumer level. Only then will I retire my trusty Raptor. Then again, I may use sata based SSD if by that time they are using SATA III and can somehow saturate the bus with like 4 of them. @_@
Hooray for technology!!!
@Kiv
You can still use your Raptor drive and benefit from SSD tech. Look into the Intel X25-E series of SSD. Sure, they are also a bit expensive per GB, but you can get a 16GB or 32GB drive (enough for any OS), and the speed increase is still incredible. Now, your Rapter can be used for high-speed near-line storage, the pagefile, Temporery Internet Files, and %TEMP% folder. For under $400, the 32GB X25-E is worth the upgrade and enough that you'll never, ever go back to spindle HDD for your OS. I have two of these drives, one in the desktop and one in the laptop. The next step might be this PCIe card, but with the current configuration I have, I can wait it out.
Another alternative is HyperOS's HyperDrive 5, a DDR-based ramdrive with a tone of features (including online backups). It'll beat out any SATA-based hardware you'll ever dream of owning, but I believe the FusionIO will still have the hands up for data transfer because of the PCIe bandwidth, but not in IOPS, compared to the HyeprDrive.
We have ioDrives at our company, but these are enterprise-level devices with built-in data redundancy, and they are (maybe were?) more expensive. However, in that environment, there is no substitute, and they can be made hardware redundant. The average high-end end-user wouln't blink an eye at the list price of this device, if they only understood the true performance gains.
If only all the poor bastards above, who've never even touched an SSD-based piece of hardware, knew what they were talking about. People just can't comment intelligently on something they've never used.
@dijitul
Oh I'm sure the raptor could still come in handy in that respect, I merely meant that if I am going to fork over serious money for SSD tech, it must truely be the absolute next level of performance. I am sure the current SSD's are blazing fast, but if it's a choice between buying a current state Intel X25, or waiting a while and grabbing a FusionIO product, I'll gladly wait. I dont upgrade that often, so I'll wait it out and make a BIG upgrade down the road.
My current system is a dual core Opteron 165, 2GB DDR400, one 74GB Raptor (old school 8mb cache), and a recently retired ATI X1800XT 512MB (just switched to a HD 4870 1GB couple weeks ago), running XP Pro (32bit). A slightly dated configuration by today's standards, but still runs pretty much everything I want it to run well enough (especially now with the new vid card).
So if I can keep myself from spending any money on impulse buys for my computer for a year or two, maybe my next computer will look something like this: (I will be making some guesses on what hardware might be out by then)
FusionIO boot drive, 4TB raid 5 storage array, at least 8GB ram (ddr4?), AMD Fusion (maybe it'll be out by then?), running Windows7 (x64)
Also, another reason I stay away from a current day SSD, is because I still am not convinced at their long term stats, people talk about performance declines and stuff. I feel like if I wait a mere few months I'd see a vast improvment in performance, reliability, price per GB, etc. I'm just not happy with the current state quite yet. I want it to be bulletproof!
There's always going to be bigger and better on the horizon, question is, how long can you last before buying something badass?
Definitely not for me. I don't do anything so earth shattering on any of the computers on my network at home to justify spending that much on such a small-capacity drive, regardless of how mind-blowingly fast it supposedly is (WTB independent review testing figures for curiosity sake, PST). Aside from that, gratz to those who do need it and can afford it/justify it for their setups, it should be a wonderful boon to them in the productivity department.