Start giving your bandwith brothers high-fives, because Fusion-io knows what you want and the latest ioXtreme SSD is setting the standard, at least for the next week, for solid-state memory speeds. Not only are they gonna make your CPU smoke, they’ll also put a good-size hole in the old wallet box.
How Fast is Fast?
Here’s an idea of what Fusion-io’s ioXtreme is capable of and what SSD’s are changing in general
- Average bandwidth of 520 MB/s
- Throughput of 700 MB/s
- 80GB of high performance, non-volatile NAND Flash storage
- Copy, edit, save massive files 5x faster
700 MB/s is nothing to balk at. mechanical hard-drives are pluggin’ away at around 131 MB/s.
The Product Development Angle
There are disadvantage and advantages to SSD storage of course. In the area of SSD for CAD and other product development related tasks, we commonly work with large data sets, which means large fragmentation on regular hard-drives. Those large models also tend to load really slow. These are both areas SSD is going to benefit CAD users.
On the downside, you have the price of SSD’s. The ioXtreme is rolling in at $895 for 80GB. Yep, $11 per giggy. Not the cheapest. Along with price, comes the size limit. That’s changing with SSD’s hitting 1TB, but then we get the price slap again. Fortunately, storage price historically plummet as the new tech gets picked up by Computer manufacturers. If you’re a CAD user, that can’t happen soon enough.
So, basically, SSD’s are the near future of storage because they have fast access times and rock the read speeds. To get more info on SSD, you can turn to the always, mostly accurate Wikipedia and really get into it at AnandTech.
HotHardware via Engadget
