ioDATA drive promises vastly superior enterprise level read and write performance at a hefty price

Most computer users want faster hard drives to aide in faster boot times and application loading. Solid state drives (SSDs) promised to improve our load times and they did to some degree.

If a measly 64GB solid state drive just doesn’t cut it for your needs, Fusion-io has a new 640GB flash based hard drive that slips into a PCI-Express x4 slot. Fusion-io promises some very swift speeds from the drive in the neighborhood of 600 Mbytes/sec sustained write speed (4000Mbytes/sec random) and 800 Mbytes/sec sustained read (8,000 Mbytes/sec random).

The ioDrive has no moving parts to increase the lifespan and reduce the risk of failure. If more capacity is needed scaling is possible by adding more ioDrive cards to the system. The sustained data transfer rates that Fusion-io promises (PDF) are vastly superior to other enterprise level storage devices on the market such as Ultra SCSI and SAS storage devices.

Supported operating systems include Linux Red Hat AS4.0, Windows Vista and Windows XP. The catch to go along with all of the performance the ioDrive promises is that the 640GB version costs a massive $19,000 USD. Gizmodo is reporting that when the 640GB drive is released in Q1 2008 80GB, 160GB, and 320GB versions will also be available.


Source from DailyTech