A couple of friends of mine, David Flynn and Rick White of Fusion-IO (http://www.fusionio.com), demoed their new product the ioDrive at DEMOfall a few days ago... Very awesome stuff!  It is a Silicon-Based NAND Flash storage solution.  It is a PCIe (x4) card that currently holds up to 640GB of solid state NAND Flash storage with a built in controller. Plans for next year will expand it to 1.2TB.

It's got 160 parallel channels to the flash chips and can do about 100,000 IOPS per card, with sustained reads of 700-800 MB/sec and sustained writes of up to 600 MB/sec.  That's about 8-9 times fast that high performance Ultra SCSI disk.  It's also about 40 times faster than Intel's SSD solid state drive. 

To put it in more directly realized terms, this data rate is equal to copying about 1 full DVD's worth of data in about 8 seconds.  Now that's fast! 

Add to that the ability to RAID multiple cards together in the same chassis for added performance and storage capacity... 

Check out the recorded demo and review that TG Daily did at DEMOfall07 with David Flynn, CTO, and Rick White, CEO, of Fusion-IO, here.  You can get the entire demo here, but no review article.

Here's another interesting review from Techworld.

Here's a chart of sustained data rates in comparison to the new ioDrive.

This stuff really rocks.  As with most new technologies, the initial costs are high (currently about $30/GB), but compared to similar breakthrough technologies, fairly comparable (ie initial GB speed network switches, the 1st 1GB hard drive, etc.).  I remembering paying $250 (at a wholesale cost) for a 400MB hard drive back in '93... That's over $600/GB... 

The future direction of this technology is where it really shakes up our current preceptions.  As more investors come online, as demand drives prices down, and competition tries to mimic this new technology, prices will dip to levels where this stuff can begin to creep in and take over in Extreme Gaming systems, Video Editing/Rendering and Multimedia systems, and high-end Business/Development PCs, as well as just the enterprise servers that are the current primary contact.  And who knows what the future may bring... The team they have at Fusion-IO is working hard on many new ways to break-down the current paridigms of the storage world, and their next announcements will shake it up as much as this one did!