Goodbye Hard Drives!!   Put Five Hundred Full Length DVDs on Your Home Computer

Ever thought you could store every DVD you own, or would likely ever buy, on a single card on your home computer? Would you like to have access to these movies (or any data) at 40 times the speed of most computer systems? A revolutionary new storage technology is about to hit the market, and it just might turn your ideas about hard drives upside down.

It is a Silicon-Based NAND Flash storage solution. It is a PCIe (x4) card that currently holds up to 640GB of solid state NAND Flash storage with a built-in controller. And that’s before they expand it to 1.2TB next year!

It's got 160 parallel channels to the flash chips and can do about 100,000 IOPS per card, with sustained reads of 700-800 MB/sec and sustained writes of up to 600 MB/sec. That's about 8-9 times faster than high performance Ultra SCSI disk and 40 times faster than Intel's SSD solid state drive.

To put it in more directly realized terms, this data rate is equal to copying about 1 full DVD's worth of data in about 8 seconds. Now that's fast! Add to that the ability to RAID multiple cards together in the same chassis for added performance and storage capacity. Wow!

As with most new technologies, the initial costs are high (currently about $30/GB), but compared to similar breakthrough technologies it is comparable (e.g. initial GB speed network switches, the 1st 1GB hard drive).

As more investors come online, as demand drives prices down, and as competition tries to mimic this new technology, prices will dip to levels where this stuff will begin to creep in and take over Extreme Gaming systems, Video Editing/Rendering and Multimedia systems, and high-end Business/Development PCs, as well as the enterprise servers that are the current primary contact. Who knows what the future will bring...

The team at Fusion-IO is working hard to find new ways to breakdown the current paradigms of the storage world, and their next announcement is sure to shake things up just like this!