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Posted by Chris Scott Barr on Jun 15, 2009

ioXtreme

My computer is pretty fast, fast enough in fact that I’ve seriously wondered at times whether or not the worst bottleneck was at my hard drive. Sure, I could set up a few disks in a RAID array to get more bandwidth, but what about going an alternate route? We sat down with Fusion-IO to talk about their latest offering, which promises to blow the lid off of hard drive speeds.

The ioXtreme is, statistically speaking, the fastest drive I’ve ever seen. This 80GB drive is comprised of NAND flash, with read/write speeds of 600MB/s. Now for those of you that don’t usually pour over hard drive benchmarks, here’s a little comparison. A really good SATA drive might get somewhere around 90MB/s, while many will hit closer to 60-70MB/s. This thing can open programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro just as quickly as if they were minimized to the system tray. If you’ve got Windows set to boot off of it, you can go from off to ready in around 1 second. (It should be noted that this feature won’t be available at launch due to compatibility issues with some BIOS, but it will be activated via a driver update.) Now if it can boot that fast, load times for your games are going to be virtually eliminated.

The ioXtreme will be launched later this year for around $800. Yes, that’s a pricey piece of hardware. However, it looks like it will be worth every penny.

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