Fusion-io Unviels PCI-e SSD for Gamers

[MoUsE-WiZ]

[citation][nom]philologos[/nom]Stupid question here...SATA2 is 3.0Gb/s, no? Then why is it 300Mb/s? Shouldn't it be 3000Mb/s?3 billion is not 300 million, but rather 3000 million. Am I missing something here?[/citation]
Gigabits and gigabytes, 8 bits in a byte (or sometimes decimal conversions are used instead of octal >

 

[MoUsE-WiZ]

Apparently making the Cartman face cuts off my comment, but the important bit made it *greater than less than*

 

[MoUsE-WiZ]

Woot for triple post! Typically you can distinguish between bit and byte listing by GB for gigabyte and Gb for gigabit, which is the convention used in the article.

 

[rockabye]

Is the loading time in games so terrible that people would spend $900 to cut it down a little? Is there really a market for this?

 

[bin1127]

fatal1ty plays quake right? isn't there some 21st century gamer that is more representative of this generation?

 

[apmyhr]

900 bucks for 80GB? Thats over 10 dollars per GB when regular hard drives are less than 10 cents per GB. Are you really willing to spend 100 times more money to save a few seconds on your game loads? My friend loves to laugh at me because he loads into Left 4 Dead maps quicker, but it doesn't matter because he still has to wait for me and other people to load the map anyways.

In fact, one could argue that this storage drive is MORE expensive than RAM! You can easily get 4 GB of DDR2 800 on Newegg for 20-30 bucks, which makes RAM less than 10 dollar per GB.

 

[Wanker79]

New tech is always stupid expensive. The current price isn't really all that important. It'll come down to mainstream enthusiast levels (i.e. VelociRaptor price-point) in the not so distant future. The important part is that this product exists, which is pretty exciting (or atleast it will be once it's bootable).

 

[Guest]

According to the Passmark test results this thing is 3x faster than the Intel X25E at workstation operations and 8x faster than the X25E at file serving.

http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/performance.php

Considering the X25E is over $10 a GB it's a way better deal.

 

[tixarn1]

Most companies advertising SSDs tend to do a little magic to put the numbers on their side, however as far as I can see the fusion-io guys are fairly honest on their benchmarks

 

[Kill@dor]

The price is really outrageous...and it doesn't boot either. I think i'll wait until the BIOS is updated, then i'll take a second look. But still, its good to know a performance boost like that is in the works ^_^

 

[ShadowFlash]

To all those comparing to RAM...I actually use RAM drives on my server boards, and while yes, they are obnoxiously fast, increasing capacity is VERY expensive. I have 16 slots of ECC DDR2 available. So if I was going to "tool it up" on a good day, approx. $100 for a 4GB stick x 16 sticks = 64GB for $1600. Going further than that of course is insanely expensive. You of course still have the problem of iron-clad BBU and delayed writes. Boot times actually take longer as the entire contents of backed up data must be loaded into memory. RAM drives have there place, but not in comparison to SSD's.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Under $900 huh? Thats a decent gaming PC right there.

And the sad thing is that card wont even give you the reach around or make you breakfast.

 

[shungopavi]

Super Talent?? Comparing this drive or any SSD to a Super Talent drive is just wrong since Super Talent is bottom of the barrel when it comes to SSD's...

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-flash-ssd-charts/benchmarks-1,48.html

And isn't $900 roughly the same list price per GB or even lower per GB than the Intel X25E 64GB SSD?

 

[SSD Kevin]

I think the Fusion-io guys are out of their minds... They promised this stuff a year ago and finaly came out with it. Yippee... Give us $900! They also promised 32-bit support, bootable and a significant drop in price. Doesn't look significant enough for me. I thought the prices of SSD were going down.

I don't think these have any capability of RAID either... thats all I need, no data protection other than an external source. These guys really didn't think this one out.