Past September in San Diego at the Demo Fall 2007 Show, the Company Fusion-io presents a a new alternative to your Hard Disk with better performance..

The ioDrive is a flash memory PCI express card with up to 6,360 Gb. of capacity and a bandwidth equivalent to 1,000 disk drives.

The ioDrive is unlike a traditional solid state disk (SSD) in that the controller and NAND memory chips are integrated on a single card which is plugged into an X86 server’s PCI Express bus and doesn’t use a serial-attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel interface.

Data is moved using direct memory access (DMA) and the card is said to have up to 160 separate and parallel I/O pipelines which aggregate to delivering over 100,000 4KB data transfers a second. Flynn says the device can transfer eight full length DVD movies at one every five seconds.

The ioDrive can be used as a tremendously fast disk or set up as swap space for a server’s RAM. Fusion-io says that ioDrives can be aggregated together in boxes which can then be integrated in a RAID system to provide greater capacity, performance and reliability.

Fusion-io says that the driver code has to be tuned to the operating system. It has released sustained data rate performance comparisons showing that the ioDrive’s 800MB/sec read I/O rating is more than 200 times faster than a Samsung 32GB SSD at 57MB/sec, and both a 146GB SAS disk and a 146GB 2Gbit/sec Fibre Channel disk each rated at 96MB/sec. The card’s sustained write I/O rate is 600MB/sec.

it will be delivered by the end of 2007 or in the first quarter of 2008. The first OS to be supported is Linux, with Windows server and then Windows client (Vista and XP) operating systems following in the first quarter on 2008.

The only inconvenient is going to be the price at the beginning as always happens with all the new stuff.

Capacities of 80, 160, 320 and 640GB are planned with pricing around $30/GB. A 160GB card would cost around $4,800. Flash prices are halving every twelve months or so, meaning the card could be $2,400 ($1,200) in 2009.