Typically if you want a high performance PCIe SSD based solution, you’re going to be paying ridiculous amounts of money. While Fusion-io’s new solution, the ioFX, is still expensive in the grand scheme of things, you’ll only need to sacrifice one body part instead of several. Fusion-io has driven the price down on this SSD flash card without sacrificing much in the way of performance.
Fusion-io is hoping to target the entertainment industry, particularly those rendering special effects, thanks to the extremely high read and write rates of the SSD. The company says that IOPS are “pretty much irrelevant”, instead believing that bandwidth and access to data is crucial. The ioFX is capable of reading data at up to 1.4GB/s, and write at around 700MB/s.
The card only comes in one size, though: 420GB. Latency is low to ensure fast access to stored data: 68ms for reads, and 15ms for writes. The PCIe card also has a cooling fan in order to cope with the extra heat found within workstations with a lot of horsepower.
The price of the ioFX? $2,495, and that includes one year of support for the card. In comparison, the next step up, the ioDrive 2, costs $5,950. The card is compatible with Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
