When will FusionIO cards be bootable, and which ones will be bootable?
I've been hearing for over 6 months now that there will be a bootable version but still nothing has happened. Can someone give a firm time on when we will be able to boot from an ioDrive or iOExtreme?
Will all FusionIO cards be bootable, or just some?
Right now the single biggest reason I don't own a FusionIO device is because I cannot boot. I think they would sell more of these to consumers if they were bootable.
Cheers, Eric
one to me for sure if it was bootable, no way without this function, and no way i buy it on the hope that it will someday be bootable
I can't comment on when or if boot will become available for any particular device... sorry. We have been talking to a lot of people though about it and we have found a good percentage who seem less interested in boot because they rarely reboot their machines anyway and giving up 10-12GB for the OS is just too much for something they don't use very often. A lot of people are putting their swap files on it and their files and apps.
Thoughts?
I'm a software developer and have to boot my system fairly often, so fast boot time is really important to me. Similarly, I want all my applications to launch lightning fast, and run fast as well.
My current system has 8 TB of RAID 5, but performance is mediocre. What I really want is to use a FusionID device as my primary boot/system storage (and paging device), and use my RAID as backup and archival. Plus overall system configuration is just so much simpler that way.
I'm concerned the ioExtreme is a little small (80GB) for my needs and am still considering an ioDrive, but I may start out with an ioExtreme to gain experience. I really think about 256 GB is optimal for a solid state system drive.
I truly believe in the future that devices like the ioDrive and ioExtreme will become the standard boot/system drive for mid to high end systems (I believed that 5 years ago before I ever heard of FusionIO). I'm just hoping to get my future started a little earlier. Eventually all systems will have PCI Express based storage, and rotating disk will either not be present, or just used for archival and backup. I'm surprised that laptops don't have flash chips just embedded on the motherboard yet. The whole idea of flash devices that emulate rotating disk drives just seems too silly for me, but I guess things had to start somewhere.
I almost considered going with the OCZ zDrive (which is bootable), but the performance reviews I read showed that Windows startup performance was unspectacular, as was application launching, so now I'm interested in FusionIO again. I saw a prototype PCI Express SSD Intel is working on that looks really nice too, but I have no idea when that will be ready for market.
I have a dual Xeon 5580 system with 12 GB of RAM, which scores 7.8 out of 7.9 on the Windows 7 performance rating, except the disk system brings down the total rating to 5.9. I really want to change that.
Anyway, please get the boot feature in the firmware as soon as possible.
You have made a product affordable to the enthusiast market, but yet you are having discussions with people that "rarely reboot" their machines. This sounds like you are catering to a niche market. The question is easy to answer. Are you going to make it bootable or not. I own the card and would like to know if the potential to boot from it is there or not. As it looks from this forum, you have quite a few people wanting to boot from the card. Why don't you have a poll that asks your users if they would like the card to be bootable or if they don't care. Maybe that will help you guys decide to make the effort of making the card bootable.
Don't misinterpret... I am not saying that all or even a majority of users don't want "boot".. just that in several circles we see a trend and I was merely pointing out an alternative view on the subject. It's been clearly stated that we are working on boot but that doesn't mean I can give you any answers as to when or what devices it would support. Of course boot would rock right now... but in the meantime.. I think the cards can do so SO much even without it.
Well the bottom line for me is that I'm not buying any product until it is bootable.
And I totally get that... but for some uses its not essential.. just wanted to make sure others knew there were reasons boot might not be everything. For instance.. I have a friend who has a recording studio running off an ioDrive. He gets just flipping fantastic performance with it.... runs an insane amount of tracks and in video editing apps ... wow. Boot for him isn't a big deal and he says he probably wouldn't use it anyway. I can TOTALLY see the need for others though... just know its very important to us and having the community's feedback is SO SO SO important.
i can see NO reason why someone would not want this bootable...the whole premise is to speed up your puter,
It's nice enough for swap files and Photoshop, but the real killer would be to accelerate the whole OS and all applications by being able to boot from it!
I really hope that boot will be implemented very soon and for all drives.
I agree... boot would be killer... you can set your Windows swap file to it (I am fairly certain) which does help post boot though.
And imagine how cool it would be to do a sleep/hibernate and resume in record time! This might encourage more people to put their computers to sleep and save energy.
Seriously, as CPUs continue to get more and more powerful, the system bottleneck is your system drive: boot/shutdown, sleep/resume, paging, application launch, etc.
If you have an ioExtreme you can still put paging and application launch on it, but it's a hassle because it's just so much nicer to keep all your system files on one volume and not have to spread them across multiple volumes.
if they were bootable the only question then is do i want one io drive or the bundle
Are you kidding me! Everything runs through your OS. Imagine, 10GB of worth of information; Overall performance of the PC will jump, including response to Registry and everything attatched. Obviously if your running a server you wouldnt shut down but for home use and games... Absolutely you want a bootable device. Did I mention the boot speed would be totaly alien technology? Especially when you go IO Extreme Pro!
Now I want to know what's going on with the boot option on the device. I called fusion IO and I was told that in the 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2010 I would be able to purchase it with the option to boot. I want to know if this is true or if I should go with the inferior version, OCZ's IO drive? I would much rather go with Fusion IO!
Absolutely! Not to mention Regestry response and overal System Response. It would make a HUGE difference not just in boot, shutdown and hybernation.