Solid state drives have always looked like being the answer to a lot of prayers. The latency time they offer is head and shoulders above that which a SCSI drive, for example, could attain, also the read time for the same reasons, is so much better. So the next part of the jigsaw is to be able to deliver this speed advantage. The People at Fusion-io have done just that by creating a drive that slots into a PCIe port.
The drive is able to sustain 1.5 Gbytes/sec of continuous read bandwidth, and that’s a lot. To put it into perspective, the consumer SSDs that are available today, trundle along at a mere 100 – 250 MB/sec. That’s why, at the moment, the people at Fusion-io are offering the drive to business. Firstly they are the ones who would benefit the most from the drive, and what it has to offer. And secondly, they are the ones who could afford it. At “Under $30 dollars per usable GB”, this is very expensive. The applications for the drive would most likely be databases, as latency, and seek times are so low, but any disk intensive application would benefit.
Other features include, “Multi-bit error detection and correction”, “Flashback protection”, that is a self-healing technology, and even RAID 1, spread between chips for redundancy on a single PCIe card. The drive is available in 160, 320, and 640 GB capacitys, with a 1.28 TB due for release later this year.
I hope this is just the start of things to come, and, as the technology becomes inevitably better, and cheaper, this type of device would be offered to the likes of me and you. And who knows, it may even speed up Windows Vista!