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Fusion-io touts 'fastest' solid-state drive

Fusion-io announces the IoDrive Duo, which the company claims is the fastest to date. It is targeted primarily at business applications such as database servers.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers

Fusion-io on Wednesday announced the IoDrive Duo, which the company claims is the fastest to date. Fusion-io also claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.

Targeted primarily at business applications such as database servers, capacities range from 160 gigabytes to 640 gigabytes. And by the second half of this year, this will increase to 1.28 terabytes.

Fusion IoDrive Duo solid-state drive capacities range up to 1.2 terabytes
Fusion IoDrive Duo solid-state drive capacities range up to 1.2 terabytes Fusion-io

The boards are based on PCI Express data bus and can sustain up to 20 gigabits per second of raw throughput--many times the rate of fast hard-disk drives. Sustained read bandwidth is 1,500 megabytes per second, while sustained write bandwidth is 1,400MBps--many times the speeds of SSDs found in laptops today. (Additional specifications are posted here.)

Because Fusion-io targets businesses, reliability is important. Its Flashback protection, for example, is a self-healing technology that is capable of instantaneously restoring lost data and uses an extra dedicated chip to repair failed devices.

Currently, the IoDrive sells for "under $30 per usable GB," according to a statement from the company.