640gb PCIe Solid-State Drive Demonstrated

Lisandro writes "TG Daily reports that the company Fusion io has presented a massively fast, massively large solid-state flash hard drive on a PCIe card at the Demofall 07 conference in San Diego. Fusion is promising sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading and 600Mb/sec for writing. The company plans to start releasing the cards at 80 GB and will scale to 320 and 640 GB. '[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. In that test, the ioDrive clocked in at 100,000 operations per second. "That would have just thrashed a regular hard drive," said Flynn. The company plans on releasing the first cards in December 2007 and will follow up with higher capacity versions later.'"

Comments

Flash Memory == Vanished Data

[egg troll]

Sadly while something like this has potential for use in certain limited academic settings, I think it would easily fail the real-world test. I would not want my data to be held hostage to a whim of electrical malfunctions. Flash cards are notoriously fickle and should its battery fall out, your data will be gone. Much like turning your computer off without saving your work. As a professor of Computer Science at a major California university, it galls me to see such devices as these promoted without a clear explanation of their drawbacks being made public.

Re:Oblig.

[nuzak]

The wear leveling that pretty much all flash chips do now puts them on par with mechanical HDD's in terms of lifetime. Furthermore, dead cells are blocked off, and the storage space simply shrinks a little bit after a few years -- it doesn't fail catastrophically.

The limited write cycles of flash drives is pretty much a non-issue. You probably shouldn't put a swap partition on one though.

Hey mods, I can just keep reposting. Fuck all of you.