We’ve talked about the fusion IO before: it’s a high-end solid state drive (SSD) designed for enterprise applications (servers). Because it is SSD-based, it has ultra-fast access time and throughput that standard disks can’t touch. Unlikemost SSD, it is not a drop-in replacement for a standard hard drive, it uses a PCI-Eslot instead. It might appearinconvenient, but this allows the ioDrive to bypass all the limitationsinherited from decades of optimizations for mechanical drives. Because it needs drivers, you cannot boot on an ioDrive, for now. This is going to change later this year with the next firmware update. ioDrive will appear in the BIOS as a “normal” drive and users will be able to use it as a boot disk. This change, along with the declining prices of flash memory could lead to a prosumer version and may be a consumer version of PCI-E based storage. We’ll keep an eye on it, but we see disk performance as a critical component of a balanced PC. (ioDrive: $3000, 80GB version)
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