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."

Comments

Re:Still can't boot off of it.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.