The concept sounds rather simple: Fusion-io takes a PCI Express add-on card and puts Flash memory and a powerful controller on it. The result is the ioDrive, which in fact should not necessarily be called a drive, as it has little to do with hard drives as we know them. Fusion-io calls its product a NAND flash cluster, and it was designed to provide DRAM-like performance. In fact the ioDrive cannot be used as a drive: it connects via PCI Express and hence it is not possible to boot an operating system from it--at least not yet--Fusion-io says it is working on that...
Application scenarios for this product are few in the desktop space; the product was designed for high performance servers. That said, it is definitely possible to install it into any desktop PC that has a x4 or wider PCI Express slot, if you think you have an application for it. When we first received the sample we were still limited to Linux, but Windows 64-bit drivers have been around for several weeks now. There are no 32-bit drivers available at this point.
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