DailyTech - 640GB PCI Express Flash Drive Costs $19,000

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Hardware 640GB PCI Express Flash Drive Costs $19,000
Wolfgang Hansson (Blog) - October 10, 2007 8:39 AM

52 comment(s) - last by sinsubtitulos.. on Oct 12 at 4:22 PM

ioDrive Storage device (Source: Fusion-io)

ioDATA drive promises vastly superior enterprise level read and write performance at a hefty price

Most computer users want faster hard drives to aide in faster boot times and application loading. Solid state drives (SSDs) promised to improve our load times and they did to some degree.

If a measly 64GB solid state drive just doesn’t cut it for your needs, Fusion-io has a new 640GB flash based hard drive that slips into a PCI-Express x4 slot. Fusion-io promises some very swift speeds from the drive in the neighborhood of 600 Mbytes/sec sustained write speed (4000Mbytes/sec random) and 800 Mbytes/sec sustained read (8,000 Mbytes/sec random).

The ioDrive has no moving parts to increase the lifespan and reduce the risk of failure. If more capacity is needed scaling is possible by adding more ioDrive cards to the system. The sustained data transfer rates that Fusion-io promises (PDF) are vastly superior to other enterprise level storage devices on the market such as Ultra SCSI and SAS storage devices.

Supported operating systems include Linux Red Hat AS4.0, Windows Vista and Windows XP. The catch to go along with all of the performance the ioDrive promises is that the 640GB version costs a massive $19,000 USD. Gizmodo is reporting that when the 640GB drive is released in Q1 2008 80GB, 160GB, and 320GB versions will also be available.

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Nice!

By Slappi on 10/10/2007 9:20:00 AM , Rating: 5

I'll take 2!!

I mean the girl not the overpriced drive.

RE: Nice!

By therealnickdanger on 10/10/2007 9:41:22 AM , Rating: 5

For that price, the girl better come with it.

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RE: Nice!

By dflynchimp on 10/10/2007 9:48:02 AM , Rating: 2

ROFL

but back to the days when normal hard drives were still a fledgling technology we were looking at up to $100/GB, so this isn't nearly as bad. I'd give it ten years to mature and drop in price (won't want the girl by then tho). Eventually it's going to become mainstream...one day...

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RE: Nice!

By killerroach on 10/10/2007 9:59:17 AM , Rating: 2

$100 a gig? I take it your memory doesn't go that far back... I remember paying $299 for an 850MB drive, and that was only just over a dozen years ago. By those standards, this thing's cheaper... just on a freakishly large scale.

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RE: Nice!

By BBeltrami on 10/10/2007 10:37:00 AM , Rating: 4

Oy! I can remember selling a 20Mb hard drive for $299 and telling the customer, "You'll NEVER fill this drive." Seems crazy, but at the time it was true...

What's that work out to? Around $14,950 per gig? Yikes.

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RE: Nice!

By augiem on 10/10/2007 12:44:55 PM , Rating: 2

I remember an ad for a 20MB hard drive in a Compute magazine I believe advertised for over $600. Calculate that to today's value and it'd be something like $1500-$1800.

And, yes, 20MB had that mindblowingly large feeling of awe we used to get from the thought of having such a huge drive and no way possible to fill it up. (PC's couldn't even come close to doing video back then) Now, somehow 1TB doesn't seem so big though. :(

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RE: Nice!

By dflynchimp on 10/10/2007 10:54:23 AM , Rating: 2

I was born in '87, so no my memory doesn't scale back as far as some others. I believe $100 a gig was the price circa '96

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RE: Nice!

By GaryJohnson on 10/10/2007 11:17:50 AM , Rating: 3

Look like August of '97 according to this page:

http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.ht...

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RE: Nice!

By dflynchimp on 10/10/2007 12:19:39 PM , Rating: 2

Daaaaaang....looks like I'm hopelessly miss informed...

$200 a gig then...hmm... looks like $100 a gig only came post 98 then. damn I'm young...

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RE: Nice!

By glomag on 10/10/2007 8:38:18 PM , Rating: 2

I was born in '87 too and I got my first computer when I was 10 or 11 ('97-'98). It was a compaq 350mhz K6 with an 8GB hard drive. The whole computer cost around $1500 so $100 per GB might be a slight overestimation.

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RE: Nice!

By melgross on 10/10/2007 12:03:28 PM , Rating: 2

You guys are either too young, or came into computers too late.

I had an Atari 800 as my second machine, after having passed on the Altair and that generation.

Floppies only held 89 KB. I was considering buying a HDD for it.

The price?

$3,500 for a 3.25 MB drive!

Needless to say, I passed.

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RE: Nice!

By augiem on 10/10/2007 1:03:32 PM , Rating: 2

WOW, that's nuts.

I did have a TRS80, Apple IIe, IBM XTs and ATs, PC Jrs, etc, but I don't ever remember knowing or caring how much things cost that far back. My mom had one of these hilarious business computers from the late 70's -- basically looked like a monochrome screen embedded into a one-piece body w/ keyboard with a massive 8" floppy drive embedded vertically on the right of the screen. As I recall, it came with its own stand/desk thing. I believe hearing she spent nearly $25,000 on it. And in today's value... YIKES!

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RE: Nice!

By Stosh68 on 10/10/2007 1:31:10 PM , Rating: 2

I bought my first hard drive in May of 1987, with my entire first paycheck of my first fulltime job.

It was a 10MB Sider for my Apple IIe, and it cost me $700.

http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n8/36_Th...

I used it for games, programming and to run a BBS for several years, and I could never fill it up.

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RE: Nice!

By melgross on 10/10/2007 12:06:35 PM , Rating: 2

[quote] I'd give it ten years to mature and drop in price (won't want the girl by then tho)[/quote]

Why? Will you be too old to be interested then?

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RE: Nice!

By NainoKami on 10/10/2007 1:09:34 PM , Rating: 2

I think he meant the girl wasn't much of an incentive if she was 10 years older... :D

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RE: Nice!

By johnsonx on 10/10/2007 2:31:52 PM , Rating: 3

I suppose we could do this all day... the first drives I purchased for servers back in '89 were 110MB ESDI drives, the big full height 5.25" bricks. Those cost close to $1,000, so that's in the neighborhood of $10,000 per gig. By that standard, that 640GB flash drive should cost $6 MILLION.

Now if I could get my Dad on, he could tell about how much the first washing-machine sized 10MB hard drives cost for 'his' DEC-10 mainframe, and then we could extrapolate that price out to some number of hundreds of millions for a 640GB drive. Then we could get some really old guy to say how much the old magnetic core memory cost per K-word, and extrapolate that out to hundreds of billions of dollars. Then we could figure out how much it would all cost using the vacuum tubes from ENIAC-1. After that, we'd talk with Alexander Graham Bell about his wax-coated drum....

Stop Now.

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RE: Nice!

By johnsonx on 10/10/2007 2:35:06 PM , Rating: 1

or was it Edison?

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RE: Nice!

By johnsonx on 10/10/2007 2:53:57 PM , Rating: 2

damn, I couldn't resist. Magentic Core Memory started out at about 1 dollar per bit, which would put the cost of 640GB of core a little over $5 Trillion. Over it's life it got down to a penny per bit, still rather pricey...

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RE: Nice!

By SavagePotato on 10/10/07, Rating: -1

RE: Nice!

By Moishe on 10/10/2007 9:46:07 AM , Rating: 1

She looks a little pixelated... Is this girl 0.3 beta?

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RE: Nice!

By CyborgTMT on 10/10/2007 3:19:14 PM , Rating: 4

Download as much of her as you want...

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/people_spe...

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untitled

By nace186 on 10/10/2007 9:16:29 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
The ioDrive has no moving parts to increase the lifespan and reduce the risk of failure.

So having moving part help increase the lifespan and reduce risk of failure? Just kidding, I understand what you meant.

It's expensive now, but just like every other piece of new technology, the price will come down in a year or two.

RE: untitled

By Bioniccrackmonk on 10/10/2007 9:19:21 AM , Rating: 2

I agree the price will come down, but unless they come up with a revolutionary way to create these types of drives, I wouldn't imagine it coming down to a reasonable price for awhile. For fun, anyone want to come up with how much storage you can have for $19,000? (I could build a couple of really nice computers for this amount)

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RE: untitled

By killerroach on 10/10/2007 9:32:23 AM , Rating: 2

For the money, the best size/cost ratio I could find on a hard drive on Newegg was a 500GB ATA/100 drive for $110 shipped. Rounding to the nearest drive, that would be 173 hard drives for the $19,000, and a total capacity of (using 1000GB/TB) 86.5TB, a factor of 135 greater than the flash-based drive.

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RE: untitled

By therealnickdanger on 10/10/2007 9:40:56 AM , Rating: 2

I would trade that much storage for an 80GB version of this thing with that level of performance. How much for the 80GB, me wonders?

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RE: untitled

By AggressorPrime on 10/10/2007 10:32:54 AM , Rating: 2

It is $30/GB.

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RE: untitled

By marvdmartian on 10/10/2007 10:32:54 AM , Rating: 2

Hey, Best Buy has the 500gb Seagates (PATA or SATA) on sale this week for $99.99. Even with my atrocious 8.25% sales tax, that still comes out a buck or so cheaper than Newegg's price per drive, which gives you another 2.5 drives, or 175 total, or total capacity of 87.5TB!! :)

Me, I'll just wait until someone has these with a 10% off coupon, maybe in conjunction with a Black Friday deal!! LOL

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RE: untitled

By maverick85wd on 10/10/2007 10:51:55 AM , Rating: 2

makes me wonder how far this thing negates the new ASUS board with an embedded OS that boots in 5 seconds....

not that the embedded OS isn't a nice touch for system recovery, but with that much space you could easily put a small partition with an OS for system recovery and boot into it with a boot loader.

definitely still a bit pricey though, will wait until a TB runs a grand or so :)

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RE: untitled

By scrapsma54 on 10/10/07, Rating: 0

RE: untitled

By TomZ on 10/10/2007 9:37:35 AM , Rating: 2

Yes, that's right, since flash is typically only good for 1 million cycles minimum. LOL.

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RE: untitled

By ksherman on 10/10/2007 10:25:01 AM , Rating: 2

Whats more, the controllers on the memory monitor which blocks have been written to the most and intelligently write to the memory evenly, thus the life of the flash memory really is quite long, probably even more reliable and longer lasting than a mechanical magnetic hard drive.

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RE: untitled

By Dactyl on 10/10/2007 3:50:13 PM , Rating: 2

By the time your drive dies (actually, it will simply shrink in size as portions of it go bad) . . . you will be able to buy a flash drive bigger than a TB for under $1,000.

HDDs, on the other hand, can seize up and die at any moment.

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RE: untitled

By Parhel on 10/10/2007 4:58:53 PM , Rating: 2

What happens if it shrinks too much and can no longer fit in the PCI slot because it's too small? Huh? What then?

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RE: untitled

By leexgx on 10/10/2007 6:03:09 PM , Rating: 1

you jokeing ?

any way if done right it take Upto 8 years before some Blocks on the flash start to die and what should happen in windows you see that the Total space will start to go smaller dono if Norm SSD disks do this (the 32/64GB ones)

one other thing should be Noted Defraging is point less
as well as all parts of the disk have the same speed Fragmented or not as the access time is 0.2ms min,max and typical per i think 1000 I/O's (mite be even more then that)
on flash it allso more likey damage it when useing defrag as it has to move data around can make the drive fail sooner

Speed if done right Sata 150/300 will be the liming factor for data speed on SSD drives, PCI-e on the other had can have 256MB/s just on PCI-e 1x so an 2x PCI-E can have 512MB/s (allso rember its Full duplex on PCI-e so its 256mb send /256mb recive total 512mb)

Static is more likey to tost one fo these things before thay fail

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RE: untitled

By leexgx on 10/10/2007 6:17:40 PM , Rating: 2

heh it uses PCI-E 4x so its got 1GB/s both ways

booting with this puppy you be limted to the probing stages of Bios/windows/linux when starting up

but £10,000 for it seems an little extream but one day it will replace Spinning disks (about time to taken them to long or Payed Not to make them)

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RAM

By niknik on 10/10/2007 10:20:51 AM , Rating: 2

Someone should make a RAM only version of it (non-flash) - like the Gigabyte i-Ram device; but with 16/32/64Gb.

That would provide most of the benefits for "regular" use, and provided it had a backup battery, it wouldn't need flash nor suffer from the flash write cycle limitation.

Can't really understand why no one hasn't come up with such a device already. Gigabyte came close - but 4Gb isn't enough these days.
And the announced v2 that would allow up to 16Gb is yet missing...

RE: RAM

By AggressorPrime on 10/10/2007 10:36:37 AM , Rating: 2

RAM is even more expensive at $50/GB vs this drive's $30/GB.

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RE: RAM

By AggressorPrime on 10/10/2007 10:43:48 AM , Rating: 2

Also RAM would probably take up more space. High density RAM can get very expensive at around $700 for a 4GB module vs $80 for a 2GB module and $25 for a 1GB module.
640GB would therefore require at least 160 4GB RAM modules and frankly I think the card pictured here takes less space than that.

Sorry for the double post, but my first one really needs some explaining.

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RE: RAM

By murphyslabrat on 10/10/2007 11:23:15 AM , Rating: 2

Also, You are limited to 1GB (?Gbit?)/s with PCI-E x4. Flash provides cheap capacity, and they almost saturate that bandwidth on the read speeds. And, with the intended applications, read-speed is the primary factor.

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RE: RAM

By Lonyo on 10/10/2007 10:55:00 AM , Rating: 2

You can get a stick of Crucial DDR2-667 for $20 AR :P

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RE: RAM

By johnsonx on 10/10/2007 2:34:04 PM , Rating: 1

you gonna fill out 640 rebate forms?

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RE: RAM

By GaryJohnson on 10/11/2007 10:46:36 AM , Rating: 2

I'd like to see an en masse memory card based solution. Something like a 3.5", SATA connected device with 32 or so slant mounted microSDHC card slots and an integrated raid controller.

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Whoa

By Polynikes on 10/10/2007 12:59:11 PM , Rating: 2

If I was stupid stinking rich I'd buy one for my gaming rig (to eliminate the only bottleneck in my system) but really, it would only net me one thing: Faster loading times. Memory is cheap enough now that all the data you need (or most of it) can be held in RAM, eliminating the hard disk as a performance limiter for the most part.

It's too bad we don't have other hardware that is so much faster than everything else but is proportionally more expensive. Imagine a 10x faster CPU, RAM or video card. :)

RE: Whoa

By kattanna on 10/10/2007 1:17:12 PM , Rating: 3

I'm still waiting for that 10Ghz CPU intel promised us we would have by now...

hehehehe

but seriously.. CPU speeds havent really increaed much in the last 2 years. Hopefully soon they will find a process to allow them to continue to ramp speeds again.

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RE: Whoa

By Dactyl on 10/10/2007 3:59:14 PM , Rating: 4

Do what I do. Take a handful of horse tranquilizers before you sit down at your computer, and it feels like the CPU is 3 times as fast (and 3x as many FPS).

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RE: Whoa

By leexgx on 10/10/2007 6:24:05 PM , Rating: 1

CPU speeds may have not gone up In GHz but in IPS thay gone up Alot Core 2 have the best in clase for customers at the time and for an Short time K10 maybe thay have better IPS as well untill intell bring theres out (repeat the loop agane and agane :P)

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Costs?

By AvidDailyTechie on 10/10/2007 11:56:33 AM , Rating: 2

Being an enthusiast I like to have the latest and greatest, but this kinda stuff is usually where I draw the line...

So what accounts for the high cost?? What do you think it actually costs to manufacture this?

RE: Costs?

By Naviblue on 10/10/2007 1:35:19 PM , Rating: 2

I can't imagine it costing 19,000 dollars. I can't wait to replace my Raptors with this sucker!! bye bye bottleneck!!

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RE: Costs?

By Dactyl on 10/10/2007 4:12:42 PM , Rating: 2

Leaving aside R&D costs, you have two expenses:

1 - the board/controller/PCIe link/etc.
2 - the flash memory

1 - is probably not very expensive at all (I would be surprised if it cost as much as $50).

2 - this is going to depend on the flash modules they use. If they have 10 64GB modules, then it's going to cost 10 x price of 64GB module.

As with RAM, the biggest modules can be very expensive. It used to be that you could get two 1GB memory sticks for about $150 but one 2GB memory stick cost more than $1,000. The price has since come down on 2GB RAM sticks.

This thing uses very high capacity flash chips, which are going to be very expensive. It's not like you can take the price of a 64GB flash drive and multiply it by 10 to get the cost of the materials for this drive.

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Cease and desist

By SnoMunke on 10/10/2007 8:02:19 PM , Rating: 2

Ok all...I am only going to say this once...STOP drooling over and ogling my girlfriend...she is mine! MINE! My precious...
LOL

That flash drive is nothing short of sick raw power...forget the girl (I already have her)...give me the drive!

The girl better be better looking

By wordsworm on 10/12/2007 1:30:30 PM , Rating: 2

The girl had better be better looking if they expect me to pay 19k for that.

About price

By sinsubtitulos on 10/12/2007 4:22:08 PM , Rating: 2

Instead of complaining about the drives' high price, has anyone cared to look the market they are targetting for? These things are not designed initially for gaming or enthusiast or whatever. This is for the enterprise, where many companies actually build huge arrays mostly because they require huge amounts of speed. At current prices for typical enterprise SANs, this thing is a bargain.

For you "ethusiasts" who simply complain about things like this, since you have money to burn do this: purchase 6 SATA 300 HDs 80HDs and put them in RAID, now bench those things and compare the results against your really expensive Raptors...after this, think about this being massively deployed in the enterprise. Finally reevaluate the "high" price tag and the market it will serve initially.

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