Super fast Fusion-io PCI Express SSD promises 700MB/s read, 600MB/s write speed

Fusion-io unveiled an upcoming super fast solid state drive that slides into a PCI Express slot. The ioXtreme will have a capacity of 80GB and will offer amazing performance, the firm claims the product will feature random read speeds of 700MB/s and random write speeds of 600MB/s. Fusion-io says their ioXtreme drive will be launched for under $1,000 in Q1 2009.

“Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, unzipping and manipulating massive files even installing a new application—all at the same time,” said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. “Suddenly, with the ioXtreme, tasks that would have brought your system to its knees are no longer limited by the disks spinning loudly inside your box.”

Mechanical disk drive technology, inspired by Edison’s phonograph and originally invented over forty years ago, hasn’t kept up with the performance of today’s PCs. Multi-core CPU’s that perform tens of billions of instructions per second sit needlessly idle waiting for disks to access files. The seemingly endless delays starting applications, manipulating large files or doing just about anything that involves moving data to or from disk can now be a thing of the past. The new memory tier offered with the ioXtreme closes this performance gap, allowing PC users to utilize disk drives for what they do best—providing inexpensive, high-capacity archival storage.

Drawing from Fusion-io’s catalogue of industry leading solid state storage technologies, the ioXtreme adapts some of the company’s most exciting innovations to bring a revolutionary consumer product to the high-performance storage market. With the ioXtreme, extreme PC users get a memory-speed storage device that has been engineered to exponentially accelerate file access and meet their demanding performance needs.

Here's a look at the performance Fusion-io promises: