re consumer/desktop market
IMHO few enthusiasts have $3,270 (8gb model) or $4,540 (16gb) let alone $8400 (32gb) to spend on such a product. That crowd will have to struggle by with 8gb of DDR2 main memory and a ramdrive software for $600, for now. At least the DDR2 has resale value for such frequent upgrades, when a affordably priced fast storage solution arrives for this market.
despite obvious unsuitability for all but a very small subsegment of this market, interestingly the manufacturer website marketing material is significantly orientated towards the consumer market, although it is fun to see people comparing $99 raptor drives with the product.
re: enterprise market
this product delivers the sort of performance this market loves and the marginal price of the unit without ram $2,500 is not "huge". It's the sort of performance that makes you want to consolidate your entire data centre onto the drive, unfortunately my data centre has more than 32gb of data otherwise this would be truly excellent.
Consider two scenarios. First, a server with less than 32gb of data - perhaps a webserver, or small database/exchange server.
- In this scenario for most cases I would put 8, 16 or 32gb of ram directly into the server and let the web, exchange or database server cache what is necessary. Servers are left on 24/7 so I'm not concerned about initial reads; writes would definitely be slower although reads which typically form the bulk of all activity are not limited by a very, very slow Ultra ATA or SATA interface.
In the second scenario my server has more than 32gb of data - perhaps a very large webserver or moderate+ exchange/database server with 200gb of data.
- This scenario is more likely to attract my attention if I have an amazingly huge I/O requirement; or perhaps if I am consolidating a number of smaller databases into one server, which significantly lowers TCO administration wise. Assuming you could physically fit the components into a server, 7 x 32gb hyperdrives ($58,800, 224gb) would be tasty and the option certainly opens up new possibilities.
Of course, for $58,000 I could get quite a nice SCSI SAS system, or use MTRON's flash disks 120/90 mb/s read/write ($1500 for 32gb version). The 2.5" and 3.5" form factor means I could easily slot 7 ($10,500) or even 15 ($22,500) of these into my raid bays for perhaps 600-800mb/s and 1300-1700mb/s depending on whether the RAID controller is good enough.
The real question is in practical terms - whether that sort of I/O performance is enough; most of the operations I consult to are on SCSI/SAS now so - yes, although demands are growing. roll on David's team with the fusionIO drive, David feel free to send me a free sample of your new 800mb/s flash drive due in 2008. actually, send me two and I'll raid them
signed, sick of bad I/O