Okay, so maybe you didn't need a full-on review to tell you that Fusion-io's
ioXtreme PCI Express SSD was staggeringly pricey, but at $11 per gigabyte ($895 for 80GB), you may want to turn a blind eye right now if you're short on disposable income. If you've managed to continue on, then you owe it to your collective senses to give the read link a look. The gurus over at
HotHardware were able to get one of these lightning fast devices in for review, and while we were always assured that performance would be mind blowing, it's another thing entirely to see those promises proven in the lab. Critics found the card to be the "fastest overall
SSD solution on the market today," with consistent 700MB/sec reads and 300MB/sec writes. Of course, they were still anxious to get their hands on a supposedly forthcoming update to make this thing bootable, and the omission of a RAID BIOS definitely put a small damper on things; still, it's hard to let annoyance such as those overshadow the monster performance numbers, but we'd recommend giving the full skinny a good lookin' at before committing your child's college education fund to a pile of NAND.
posted November 16th 2009 5:23PM
How are the chips on this thing any different from what's in your typical SSD? Seems like there's always a catch to such impressive numbers (over 3x improvement over an Intel SSD).
Different NAND chips, much faster then standard NAND chips found on many SSD drives. Look at OCZ drives, they are way more expensive then the cheap Patriot ones that have 100MB/sec read/write rates. The faster the NAND chips are, the more expensive they are.
Guys what is this thing? Is it a video card? Or a Hard Drive?
neither. it's a solid state drive, though yes, it functions similar to a hard drive, i.e., it's for storage. i don't know about the chips being faster, but i do know that the PCIe interface is faster than SATA.
@AI.O. Yes, because some people love computers just as much as others love cars and will save for this kind of thing. And frankly, cars are a lot more expensive, so if that's your cup of tea, why not?
It's not the chips, it all in the purity if the cheetah blood ;-)
I've said this several times already and I'll say it again. I'm getting this card for our review systems where we need raw throughput from the storage device for previewing rendered frames up to 4K, at least at 24fps. This thing will finally allow us to get rid of extremely expensive RAID configurations with SSD and such, as it is smaller, consumes less power, it has less capacity, however, but it's not such a big deal since we use the drives only for temporary data streaming, and also, it's much cheaper than those SSD RAIDS!
I can't wait for the first batch to arrive at our studio later this week, hopefully!
SSDs right now are capped by the 3Gbit SATA bus they're using as an interface - they can go faster with the same NAND flash chips.
nobody needs this thing.
i don't think they would have produced it if they thought nobody would buy it.
People will buy it but not because they really need it but because it's the new thing out.
well, define "need." there are people that live their lives without internet; do you really "need" internet? not really, you just find it well worth the cost; same deal with the people who would buy these.
So you could really justify paying $900 for this 80gb hard drive just to make your computer boot up faster????????
that's not the only use for these, nor is faster load times for video games. i don't know all the uses, but i imagine they could be useful for server-related stuff, or any other number of applications that require copying/reading/storing huge amounts of data very quickly.
If you do data intensive work like uncompressed movie-theater-bound video editing or billboard size graphic image editing work, then if this thing saves you 30 minutes of wait time each day and you earn $100 an hour, then that means this device earns you $50 a day. So it'll only take 18 days until this thing has paid for itself and which is then earning you an additional $50 profit every single day thereafter.
Look at loocas's commment above: "we need raw throughput from the storage device for previewing rendered frames up to 4K, at least at 24fps". There's a justification for buying one ;)
You completely lack imagination when it comes to computers. Nobody "needs" 3GHz quad cores and 8GB of RAM either. However the mass storage is ALWAYS the bottleneck in high performance PCs. Faster storage helps everything in the computer reach it's full potential in everyday usage.
I wonder what is necessary for this to be bootable? Does your BIOS have to allow for booting from a PCI-X device? How about the operating systems you intend to install? Do they need a new driver or what?
It's probably just a driver. There have always been options for PCI and PCIe raid cards, you just need a disc (or usb drive) with the drivers for it plugged in when you install windows. During the OS install there's an option to install RAID drivers, just pick the ones for this card and you're good to go. Not sure if it's as simple in OSX or Linux.
Yeah, I'm interested in how Linux, Haiku, and eComStation would handle it.
Oh well, I'll just stick to my CF->SATA SSD for now :\
Did you guys not read the article? There's no RAID BIOS on the card --> it's not going to be bootable any time soon.
This or $899 worth of p0rn...
OMG, help me decide!!!
Please don't be a douche and waste this thing storing your pr0n when you really only need a 7200rpm hdd.
Not if its Ultra Porn!
If it's ultra pr0n it that implys it's at least blu-ray and a normal full length pr0n film being over 120minutes your looking at only being able to have about 5-6 movies.... have fun with that...
@AI.O.
Take it down a notch nerd, it's sarcasm.
Wait, you're paying for p0rn? That's just crazy talk.....
Wow they're going to make them bootable?? That changes everything - now if I could just win that lottery
inb4 Apple invented video cards
this article has nothing to do with Apple OR video cards. these are SSD's. what are you smoking? seriously, posts like yours are almost as bad as the trolls.
A lot of posts I've seen have nothing, or very little to do with it anything apple, however it doesn't stop them.
mmm... two of these in RAID 0 with a bootable Win7 partition... tasty. then throw in a few 2 TB HDD's in RAID 5 for general storage. i'd love, just once, to build the most powerful computer i possibly could. it would only be top dog for maybe a month, but man would it be cool.
What could you possibly do with 1400mb/s that you couldn't do with one of these at 700mb/s?
Even with Bill Gates money, (what he hasn't given away), that would be a waste.
read a GB in under a second? i didn't say it was at all practical, just awesome.
what has this article with steve wozniak to do? (tag list)
He co-founded the company
please tell me english isn't your native language.
I don't have any children you insensitive clod!
@maveric101: no, it's not my nativ language :)
so, I guess you're from usa. tell me, what other languages do you learn at school?
American and fail languages like french and spanish. I
Fail. I get about 550Mb/s reads and 475MB/s writes with two OCZ Vertex 64GB in Raid0 on an Adaptec 2ch card. That's 128Gb of storage, ridiculously fast and way cheaper.
Super cool man.. What type of application do you put these bad boys to work on?
the Vertex is a great drive, but the real performance these drives bring is the random read and writes, as well as IOPS. If you read the review, you'd see that's where a huge chunk of performance gain is to be had.
@lexicon: EVERY app. Windows 7 feels like it's running in memory (off a ramdrive) - everything's instantaneous, games take seconds to load, etc.
I sat on the fence about SSD a long time and now I deem it as unequivocally the single best component you can upgrade in a system - it makes THAT much of a difference. Even just a single OCZ vertex turbo makes everything load ridiculously fast.
Mb and MB are different.
Man, in the 90s I wished there was a card you could throw into your PC to make Windows boot really fast. Somebody finally did it, just 10 years too late.
When they make one with 512gb that costs half as much then MAYBE it will be useful.
People have been citing one use that justifies this card as being the editing of uncompressed HD video. Unfortunately, at 1080p resolution, 80gb would hold less than 8 minutes worth of uncompressed video. Maybe if you're editing fairly short segments that's enough, but there just aren't going to be that many people who need that kind of speed but can live with that little storage.
And let's not forget to add in the time needed to copy 80gb of data from your archival hard drive to the SSD before you start editing, and then the time needed to copy it back after you're done.
Priced as it is, I'm thinking this card is at least 75% profit. The real trick to making a card like this fast isn't to use fast Flash RAM, although that will make it even faster. But the real trick is to make the whole thing massively parallel. We can see that it's got at least 12 Flash RAM chips on it, and I'd guess that the big chip under the heat sink is a custom controller that spreads read/write requests across those 12 separate channels so that it can read or write 12x as much data in about the same amount of time it would take to access a single chip. Ultimately, this is a RAID device for flash RAM chips. It doesn't have to look like a RAID device to the computer it's installed in for it to work that way internally.
I have no doubt there will be soon be a variety of similar devices from other companies, at much lower prices. Heck, how about a PCI-E device that has something like 8 or 16 slots on it for you to install your on SDHC cards?
It's a bummer that you can't raid them, because then someone would have posted "I'll take two"
You can! You can add as many to your system as you have available PCIe 4X slots and they work together in RAID to increase performance and storage.
I was excited up until I saw its not bootable. High IO "drives" are useless to most consumers until they are bootable. It's all good and well for the average consumer to watch their game or app open fast, but if windows is still slow... meh. Sure those who need high IO for certain apps will still buy one, I am merely talking the average enthusiast.