SSD maker Fusion-io has introduced its ioFX PCIe-based solid-state drive for workstations that contains 420GB of storage. Meant for HD video editing in the movie industry for special effects work, the card uses a less costly internal design than other Fusion-io cards. There are four flash channels, or a quad-die package, so there is half of the write I/O per second performance of the previous products.
Fusion-io has expanded its enterprise SSD line with two new drive systems, the ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo. Thoughput maxes at 3.0GB/s read and 2.6 GB/s write speed for the 1.2TB model ioDrive2 Duo. The drives feature low latency access for mixed workloads with 15 microsecond write latency, over 700,000 read IOPS and over 900,000 write IOPS. An intelligent self-healing feature called provides complete, chip-level fault tolerance, which enables the drives to continue to function without interruption after a single- or a multi-chip failure.
A newly-formed SSD Form Factor Working Group has been formed, with the aim of bringing out a PCI Express-based SSD standard. Made up of promoter members Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM and Intel, the group will focus on enterprise customers who need ever-higher performance storage that is cost effective and easy to use. While PCIe based SSDs are available now, they aren't simple and are usually reserved for servers, workstations and very high-end gamers.
Samsung today invested an unspecified amount of money into relatively young storage maker Fusion-io as part of a larger partnership. The deal gives Fusion-io a safer position to develop its lineup but will also see it and Samsung co-develop new solid-state drive technology. The smaller of the two will also get better access to Samsung's flash memory.
OCZ on Friday took its turn at the new class of RAID-striped solid-state drives and launched the Z-Drive. Like offerings from Fusion-io, the Z-Drive ties together four SSDs to a central RAID controller and plugs into a PCI Express slot, eliminating the bottlenecks of SATA and transferring data twice as fast or more than single SSDs. OCZ claims peak read speeds of 510MB per second and peak writes of 480MB per second for its top-end drive.
High-speed solid-state drive maker Fusion-io today marked the occasion of getting $47.5 million in extra funding by providing early details about a new storage device. The ioSAN (Storage Area Network) will borrow the same concept of a PCI Express drive with multiple SSDs in a RAID stripe but put it on a local network, theoretically giving the benefits of the extra-quick read and write times as quickly as the network allows. It's unknown if it would use Ethernet or else a faster but more exotic networking method like Fiber Channel.
Micron has developed an extremely fast solid-state drive that could set new records for internal storage and shown the drive in an early test. The claimed new breakthrough in storage uses two SSDs with 16 data channels for the flash memory to generate a total transfer speed of 1GB per second. The performance tops 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and is quick enough that Micron has to drop Serial ATA II's 300MB per second bandwidth cap in favor of PCI Express.
Normally known for its business storage, Fusion-io today provided a glance at an upcoming solid-state drive built for very high-performance home systems. The ioExtreme card will hold just 80GB but switches from SATA to PCI Express and is tuned for sheer transfer rate above all else: data reading speeds hover between 500MB and 700MB per second, or about five times as quick as current SSDs. The extra speed is pitched as ideal for particularly disk-heavy tasks such as compiling code, content editing or large games.
