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Fusion-io IoXtreme's Consumer-Class PCIe SSD — Impressive Throughput
MojoKid writes "When Fusion-io's first ioDrive product hit the market, it was claimed to be a 'disruptive technology' by some industry analysts, with the potential to set the storage industry on its ear. Of course the first version of the ioDrive was an enterprise-class product that showed the significant potential of PCI Express direct-attached SSD storage, but its cost was such that the mainstream market couldn't possibly justify it, no matter what the upside performance looked like. Then we heard of Fusion-io's more consumer-targeted play, the ioXtreme, that was announced this past summer. Fusion-io has only very recently released these new, lower cost cards to market. The first-ever full performance review of the product over at HotHardware shows the half-height PCI Express X4 cards are capable of a robust 800MB/sec read bandwidth and about 300MB/sec of write bandwidth. The cards particularly excel versus a standard SSD at random read/write requests and even perform relatively well with small block transfers."
You don't really still need the spinning media. There's a cheap, incredibly easy, fast and inexpensive media that's perfect for booting your computer, and your computer is loaded with ports for it. It's called a USB thumbdrive.
It's pretty simple actually: they're cheap and easily available in all kinds of different sizes ranging from "I just need to boot Linux" (256MB) to "I want all of my apps on it too" (32GB+), they're writable so you can update the OS, and you've likely got a multitude of ports inside of your computer that go completely wasted because they're not connected to anything (and a pigtail for one of these is a nickel at a computer store, if your motherboard didn't come with a few in the box). Just plug it in, plug in the USB drive, install your OS on it, and be done. You can choose to swap to it or the faster media at your own discretion.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
It probably isn't all that hard to write the code for it, at least not by the standards of whoever developed the firmware for this product.
Making sure that "the code" is present, and actually functions, on god-knows-how-many motherboards, each with its own BIOS horror show, is probably pretty tricky.
By far the easiest way is simply emulating an SATA controller; but then you would lose out on the assorted FusionIO special sauce and might as well just buy the cheaper intel drives and plug them into your existing SATA ports.