Fusion-io whips out fast gov-grade ioDrive Fusion-io has put eight of its ioDrives on a single PCIe card to produce 800,000 IOPS and 6GB/sec bandwidth. The ioDrive is a NAND flash solid state drive (SSD) that sits on a PCIe X4 card and comes with 80 or 120GB of single level cell (SLC) flash or 320GB of slower but cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) flash. These ioDrives …
I worked with him on an project a few years back, when BitMicro were really all there was.
I have to say that I predicted this kind of lunatic hardware then, and still maintain that the rotating disk companies will not survive this recession.
In two years, all government aircraft will be flying fusion-io hardware, becoming completely unmanned, afterwards they'll fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill will be passed.
Joking aside, this sh*t flies like nothing you've ever seen. And while my interest in this case, is in embedded systems that need localised supercomputer capability, it will be in SQL Server boxes all over by Chrismas 2012.
It's all over for rotating media.
I suppose it's easy to forget that rotating media can be pressed these days for much less than a penny per GB.
Rotating magnetic media may be on the way out, but until etched silicon reaches cost parity with pressed aluminium, rotating optical media will be with us for a while longer.
@Eddie Edwards.
This is indeed true what you say. But it's only this cheap because of massive volume sales. I'm sorry for my earlier generalisation, but it's only a matter of time. My prediction was based on another couple of years before the world's economy is back where it was a couple of years ago.
By this time, SSDs will make today's look stupid at the current rate.
Silicon doesn't have to reach the cost of rotating media at all. It only has to reach a price where large numbers of people are tempted for a big enough disk. Once large numbers start buying, this eats into the profits of the rotating disk drive manufacturers, causing price rises. It also encourages investment in future tech,
A could buy a terabyte 3.5in for whatever, say 100 quid, but I'd much prefer a state of the art 250Gig SSD for four times that much. Most ordinary people don't come close to filling a 100Gbyte drive. It's performance they would prefer (were they not blinded by the marketing hype.)
As more and more people see their mate's ludicrously fast SSD based laptop, they'll want one, and while I agree that it's not all roses at the moment, technology solves all, and we have to bear in mind they've only really been mainstream for two years. They're getting better almost every week.
I don't deny that there will still be people with super large data requirements, say >1 PByte that will still use rotating for longer, but everyone else won't. In the end, rotating drives will have the same customer base as mainframes, such as government and research companies. The long tail of small purchases will, once it starts, disappear quite quickly I think.
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