I get excited watching technology advance. Which pretty much means I stay excited. This particular change is very interesting to me because I have wondered, instead of correcting the issue, why computer architects have not started replacing hard-drives with flash type memory.
Other than the price tag and the equal or slower writing speed this seems like a better solution. Of course if you're the type who enjoyed hearing your modem dial into Compuserve and who likes to hear the whir of your spinning disk drive you may think this move is an infringement on your ability to hear your computer grinding through electrons ...
Fusion-io tries rewiring computer memory
Fusion-io builds flash memory onto PCI Express cards that plug into server expansion slots, letting customers move beyond hard drives' physical enclosures and SATA interface. That means data can be written and read faster overall, in part because SATA has worse overhead--in other words, bandwidth that must be used to run the communication protocol rather than for the actual data being read or written.
The current third-generation version of SATA has a maximum bandwidth of 6 gigabits per second, though that's reduced by the overhead. Fusion-io's lower-end ioDrive matches that rate, it's ioDrive Duo doubles it with 12Gb/sec, and its newest product, the ioDrive Octal, is eight times higher, at about 50Gb/sec. (Note, though, that those are speeds for reading data; writing data is anywhere from the same speed to two-thirds the speed, depending on the model and how much memory it has.)
Read more at news.cnet.com
The ioDrive is modest in scope, with capacities of 160GB, 320GB, and 640GB. The Duo reaches 1.28TB, and the Octal--which is twice as wide--comes in 2.56TB and 5.12TB sizes.
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