One thing in common with virtually all modern hard drives is that their interface has an IDE or Serial ATA interface and requires a free HD bay to install. While SATA2 currently allows up to a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 300MB/sec, at present this does not pose much of an issue, since most hard drives cannot sustain a transfer rate over 100MB/s. Now, the Utah-based start-up company Fusion-io has unveiled a flash card that blows away pretty much every hard drive on the market with it being able to read at 800MB/s, faster than what even the upcoming SATA 6.0 Gbps interface will be able to handle!
To overcome this bottleneck issue, this card has been designed as a PCIe storage card, which allows it to be slotted into most motherboards with a free PCIe slot. As a result, there is no SATA or IDE bottleneck and the drive does not require any free HD slots.
The features of the card include 800MB/s read, 600MB/s write and an impressive 100,000 I/O operations per second using the proprietary technology ioMemory. To overcome the limited rewrite life of flash memory, the card incorporates complex error correction techniques, which results in a typical service life of eight years compared with the typical five-year lifespan of a mechanical hard drive. However, once bits of the flash finally begin to fail, this will result in a gradual reduction of available storage space rather than data loss or sudden failure.
The cards will initially be available with Linux drivers in a choice of 80GB, 320GB and 640GB when they launch in December. Windows XP, Vista and server drivers will be made available shortly after and the company expects to ship a 1.2TB version later. As expected, pricing does not come cheap with the company aiming to ship the drives for under US$30 per Gigabyte. To give a comparison, mechanical hard drives start at around 21¢ per Gigabyte.
Further info can be read in this source APCMag article and on the Fusion-io homepage.
