Fusion-IO announces consumer PCI-E SSD line

hmurchisonhmurchison
Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
It's hot! And expensive



http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/



$895 gets you the kind of performance that makes your knees buckle and your cat and dog slobber with delight.



Just one problem....no Mac drivers



520MBps!



We gotta get this on the Mac. Though I can see why it's a low priority for Fusion-IO seeing as the only Mac with PCI-Express slots start at $2499.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    This really is nice, I hope that it is a bootable device. Booting was something FusionIO was working on but didn't support, at least a year or two ago the didn't. Of course if it isn't supported on a Mac then there is little sense in worrying about that.



    Which make me wonder why they don't emulate a traditional interface, for trivial porting ot other hardware. Performance speaks for itself though, which makes me wonder how much longer we are going to be stuck with SATA. I'm not to sure that SATA 3.0 will perform well up against this sort of device.



    As to price that is certain to come down, especially after the competition heats up a bit.



    Also notable is that maybe Mac support is coming but they are waiting for Leopard. I say that because all the current indicated OS support revolves around 64 bit OS'es. It would actually be a smart move on FusionIOs part if you ask me. Keep the driver base small and manageable which hopefully will mean fewer bugs.





    Dave
  • Reply 2 of 4
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,425member
    Yes



    Wozniak "is" their Technology guy, you'd think that they'd at least look at the content creation mavens using Mac Pro.



    No rush though at $895 it's damn expensive for 80GB but they should be able to offer the same pricing for a 160GB model in 12-18 months.



    I expect that this market will be more lucrative than many realize. Once you can get 256MB of bootable storage in a PCI-Express slot that delivers bandwidth beyond what even SATA-6Gbps can offer you have something that DCC will eat up.



    the old ICE DSP accelerators cost more than that and only worked with certain apps.



    Hmmm removing boot OS from the SATA bus opens up all 4 Mac Pro drive bays for spinning rust storage and offers some nice RAID redundancy.



    I haven't seen a true benchmark of PCI-e SSD ...plenty of vendors talking a good game and showing mockups but who's going to deliver good working hardware and software?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer Posts: 7,503member
    SATA 6 Gbit/s



    Serial ATA International Organization presented the draft specification of SATA 6 Gbit/s physical layer in July 2008,[10] and ratified its physical layer specification on August 18, 2008.[11] The full 3.0 standard was released on May 27, 2009.[12] While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Intel's Solid State Disk drives are close to saturating the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed, and other new drives including Super Talent, Memoright and Samsung are close to that as well. Ten channels of fast flash can actually reach well over 500 MB/s with new ONFI drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/s would benefit the flash read speeds. As for the standard hard disks, the reads from their built-in DRAM cache will end up faster across the new interface.[13]

    The new specification contains the following changes:
    • A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications.

    • An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands.

    • Improved power management capabilities.

    • A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices.

    • A connector designed to accommodate 7 mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks.

    • Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard.

    I'm seeing nothing referring to WRITE speeds with SSD drives. Hard drives aren't going away any time soon.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,425member
    Nope



    I think SSD and HDD make for a nice complementary team. It's worth it to me to put the OS on the fastest drive and then leverage the capacity of HDD for mass storage.



    The Enterprise has been tiering storage for decades...today we're seeing an emphasis on consumers tiering their storage as well.



    I'm hoping for Snow Leopard options for PCIe SSD. Also these IoXtreme cards can be ran in a parity RAID configuration as well.
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