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Screw SSD, give me one of these!

2

2002cbr600f4i

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 21, 2008
489
0
Got a call from a buddy of mine who is an IT manager at a Fortune 100 company. His group is in charge of the datacenter for one of their big online products and he has vendors showing him new products all the time...

Well, he called to tell me about these guys: http://www.fusionio.com/

Apparently that's the company that Woz is involved with now. He passed along the contact info for the sales rep and gave the rep mine.

I do some product reviews for another site (edited, sorry, didn't know people had a problem with posting about other non-competing sites here...) and am going to talk with the rep about getting a card in to review.

Currently their stuff isn't supported on the Mac, but from what the rep has said, it's in the works and should be out before the end of the year.

Now the kicker - You plug it into your PCI-E x16 slots. So, it doesn't use up a drive bay, it's totally silent, no moving parts, and it has the full PCI-E bandwidth to work with rather than just the SATA 300 speed spec.

Check out the specs on this datasheet! http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/

Basically for the cost of 2-3 (I was told $900, but that might be for the server version, dunno, need to ask the sales guy directly) of Intel's 80GB SSD's raided together, this thing beats the snot out of that RAID and then some! And you still have all your drive bays to use.

(I have some links to some of their server card benchmarks as well, but they're on my iPhone so I'll have to post them later.)
 
No thanks, too pricy and doesn't show what i actually care off, Random 4k Read/writes.

Real world performance is measured in Random 4k numbers, sequential is for the perfect world.
 
Oh, I agree on the price... It's high...

Dunno about the 4K random writes... Hence why I'm going to try to get a unit in to test and write up a review on.

But if it pans out, and you ABSOLUTELY need that kind of speed, that seems like a pretty kick butt option! And lets face it, there ARE those of us who will pay that to get that kind of speed.

MasterDev said:
Is it just me, or did that guy slip in an affiliate link in his post?
Click to expand...

Fine, I just edited it out.

Sorry, didn't realize that was against the rules to put up a link to a site that doesn't compete at all with MacRumors...
 
2002cbr600f4i said:
Fine, I just edited it out.

Sorry, didn't realize that was against the rules to put up a link to a site that doesn't compete at all with MacRumors...
Click to expand...

I wasn't talking about the REAL url. The click-able part had a click through link added onto it.
 
NAND flash for that money? Looks sick, but Random I/Os might be the current bottleneck.. trying to get their performance on par with Intel and Indilinx (is that how you spell it?) controllers.

On the bright side, at least its not limited by the SATA bus :rolleyes: And don't get me wrong, this thing could be the bomb. It just doesn't look redundant, which is something I would expect at that price, regardless of capacity.

I'll stick to my current upgrade path that involves MBA330s.:)
 
MasterDev said:
I wasn't talking about the REAL url. The click-able part had a click through link added onto it.
Click to expand...

Oh, I don't run that site, so I dunno. Must be something new that the owners added. It's run by a couple former co-workers of mine, and they throw me stuff to write reviews of from time to time. I do most of their game reviews.

Hmm... Looks like there is a pretty decent review of their server class product vs a 2 and 4 drive RAID array of the Intel SSD's here

Now, granted, that's the SERVER card ($7K!) but if the consumer card is similar, that looks pretty dang tasty to me!
 
They're useless for most users. Not because of speed reasons, but because for the time being, you can't boot off them. So you would still need a regular drive coupled with one of these.
 
The consumer model is only PCIe x4 lane, and at $900USD for 520MB/s, may have a hard time with those that can stripe a set of small SSD's. The Intel 80GB (G2's for example) would give 2x the capacity at half the price (MSRP, not street). :rolleyes:

I'm far more interested in the server model, but at $7kUSD, I'll be passing for awhile. ;)
 
When I saw the thread title I kind of expected to see a holographic storage drive or something.
 
Old news...

2002cbr600f4i, that's really kind of old news.
You know, search is your friend! Especially with such a unique search term as 'fusionio'.

We already had posts back in May about it.

And a month ago I already posted that I had contacted Fusionio about Mac drivers and that they told me then that they're in the works, but will still take a few more months.


Their speed is surely amazing, but my biggest worry is their lack of GBs.
By the time they finally hit the market SSDs will have reached 512GB in 9.5mm 2.5" enclosures.
Would you really go for a measly 80GB just for the speed, especially if the 80GB cost you as much as the other 512GB 'slower' SSDs?

If they manage to get half the capacity at 2-3 times the speed and still at the same price as 'normal' 200MB/s SSDs then they will have a good chance in the retail sector.
Otherwise they'll just be a very small niche player.
 
nick9191 said:
Screw that, check out what IBM's bringing to the table :)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-nanotech-memory-flash-ssd,7594.html
Click to expand...

Agreed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIjK1dMdTGY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcqvJI8J6Lc

The Fusion I/O devices are old and have been around for almost as long as RAM itself. It's a server part (think data-center) and they're usually called I/O Accelerators. They're very expensive as you can see here ;) and mainly only useful as a large buffer between massive storage host and requesting stations in cloud computing. To use one as a dedicated storage device in a workstation is novel IMO, but will never become popular enough to become affordable.

Racetrack memory on the other hand actually has something significant to offer. It's the bubble-memory-like media I hinted at here about 4 months ago. Of course no one noticed but that's not important. What's cool is that in 3 or 4 years (if we're all not dead and the world is still here) we'll have 10 terabyte devices that can be uses for both system memory and as a storage device! Very significant indeed!
 
I'm using dual SSDs in OS X and now also in Vista64 with an Areca 1210 card. I don't think it is that much slower to use two RAID0 SSDs compared to this dohicky. But for the price of 80 GB I got 128 GB + 160 GB + a four port SATA RAID card that allows me to bring the number of SATA ports in my MacPro up to ten and have eSATA as well. Better value for money. The downside is a bit of time lost when I boot because the card firmware takes time to sync with the Mac.
 
gugucom said:
I'm using dual SSDs in OS X and now also in Vista64 with an Areca 1210 card. I don't think it is that much slower to use two RAID0 SSDs compared to this dohicky. But for the price of 80 GB I got 128 GB + 160 GB + a four port SATA RAID card that allows me to bring the number of SATA ports in my MacPro up to ten and have eSATA as well. Better value for money. The downside is a bit of time lost when I boot because the card firmware takes time to sync with the Mac.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Very comparable on speed, and for less money. :)
 
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