14 DAY TRIAL // For a while, Fusion-io looked like it would become a solid player on the PCI Express storage market, but in the end, the company is succumbing to the same fate as hundreds before it: assimilation.
SanDisk is the company subsuming it, which means that it will gain quite a bit of technological acumen and experience with NAND Flash-based storage devices featuring PCI Express form factor.
PCI Express SSDs are far more capacious, and most importantly, faster than 2.5-inch SATA drives. Where conventional storage units (the latter) read and write at around 500 MB/s, PCI Express drives can reach 1.8 GB/s or even over 2 GB/s in certain cases.
Only the M.2 interface comes close to that, and that's only because it, too, is wired through the PCI Express root complex. Except when it's wired through SATA, in which case it drops to 500-600 MB/s, but I digress.
Out of Fusion-io's most recent products, the ioFX Super-SSD (1.6 TB) and ioDrive2 models stand out the most. All that remains to be seen is how SanDisk improves on them, assuming it even keeps the Fusion-io brand going now that the deal has closed.