Fusion io PCIe flash drive

Over at tgdaily they’ve posted about an interview with the CTO, David Flynn, of Fusion io talking about their new ioDrive. The ioDrive is a PCI Express card with 640 GB of flash memory that you can slip onto your motherboard to provide extra networked storage. The unit does indeed boast some impressive figures with a read rate of 800 MBps and 600 MBps for writing. Probably the single most impressive figure is the 100,000 operations per second which far out strips any standard HDD.

What confused me was that the claim by Fusion io that the tiny card could replace banks of hard drives. Err, I think not, with a 640 GB unit planned for early next year it’s certainly an alternative to standard HDDs but the implication is that it will save computing space. Whilst the max capacity is only 640 GB, I don’t think it will do that at all. Whilst I’m not going to calcuate the volume of a PCI express card compared to a HDD unit I think anyone can easily see that it’s going to be pretty close to 1:1 ratio on space used when comparing a 640 GB PCI express drive to one of the 1 TB HDDs out there at the moment. I agree that the io Drive will be able to serve files much more efficiently over a network but as usual a company has spouted off some marketing rubbish whilst ignoring the actual benefits of their product.

Another thing that annoyed me was the implication that their estimated cost at US$30 per GB would interest a lot of large organisations. May be it would but when current storage costs are around US$0.30 per GB any organisation investing in this storage technology would have to have some pretty serious file serving issues. So for the other 99.99% of the world (that’ll be you and me) we’ll be ’shackled’ with our oh so slow HDDs for a while yet!