Fusion-io says that it has achieved extremely high data transfer speeds in solid-state drives on HP servers. Fusion-io and HP built a system using five 320GB ioDrive Duos and six 160GB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four quad-core Opteron processor. The System was able to achieve 1 million input/output operations per second (IOPS).

In comparison hard drives only achieve fraction of this level of data transfer speed, making solid-state drives appealing for database, data mining, virtual machine deployments and financial transactions. David Flynn, chief technology officer of Fusion-io says, “The ioDrive and ioDrive Duo are able to supply the extreme storage performance (for data centers) at a fraction of the power, cooling, and per unit of processing-power price compared to traditional solutions.”

Solid state drives are both becoming faster and cheaper, making it highly likely that within few years they will replace hard drives as primary storage device in computers.
[Via CNET]