So how fast is the ioDrive? Flynn said the card has 160 parallel pipelines that can read data at 800 megabytes per second and write at 600 MB/sec. He even proved it by running a Linux drive I/O benchmark. But for large corporations running busy databases, operations per second is a much more important number than bandwidth.
Flynn set the benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. In that test, the ioDrive clocked in at 100,000 operations per second. “That would have just thrashed a regular hard drive,” said Flynn.
The company plans on releasing the first cards in December 2007 and will follow up with higher capacity versions later. Linux drivers will be included and Flynn said Windows Server, XP and Vista drivers will be available three months after that. He even hinted that the company is looking into some gaming applications, but didn’t want to give any further details.
“If you were crazy enough, you could use this in a high end game machine.”
So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB, something that should seem very cheap to large corporations, adding “You can drop ship or Fedex this card and be up and running in a few minutes… you can’t do that with a storage area network.”
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