14 DAY TRIAL // At the E for All conference and expo, Fusion IO, a worldwide provider of ultimate solid state technology and high-performance I/O solutions, announced its ioXtreme, the first consumer product of the company. The ioXtreme is a PCI-Express-based high-performance 80 GB solid state storage solution designed for high-end PC users and able to enhance the speed of their computers. According to the company, both enthusiasts and gamers will benefit from the massive bandwidth the new card offers.
“Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, unzipping and manipulating massive files even installing a new application - all at the same time,” said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion IO. “Suddenly, with the ioXtreme, tasks that would have brought your system to its knees are no longer limited by the disks spinning loudly inside your box.”
Solid state drives are said to be today's best choice for users that wish to have a PC featuring low power consumption and high performance. Currently, SSDs face bandwidth limitations due to the use of SATA II (300 MB/s), and can reach read speeds of up to 200 – 250 MB/s. Intel's 80 GB SSDs, which have been recently announced, are included in this category, and they have a price of $595.
Even so, platter based drives have been outpaced by SSDs in terms of speed and reliability. The current multi-core processors need storage solutions able to access files without idle times, while they also require a fast manipulation of extra-large files. ioXtreme comes to fulfill all the needs of today's high-performance computers, something that HDDs wouldn't be able to do.
Fusion IO will have its latest unveiled product available in the first quarter of 2009, at a price said to be under $1,000. Those that will wait for it to hit the market, and who also have a few dollars to spare, will get a product able to hit a data throughput of 500 MB/s to 700 MB/s. According to the company, the ioXtreme can handle about 50,000 I/Os per second. Compared with HDDs, the new product will offer 20 times their performance, and 5 times that of today's mainstream SSDs.
As the new Fusion IO ioXtreme is plugged into a PCI Express slot, users are able to use hard drives or other SSDs for mass storage. The card offers all the performance levels professional CAD/CAM users, software developers and enthusiasts need. As the company says, extreme PC users will have a memory-speed storage device especially engineered to exponentially accelerate file access, and able to fulfill their demanding performance requirements.