Looking to secure a stronger foothold in the fast-growing flash storage business, Samsung has announced today it is investing "millions" in startup company Fusion-io. The undisclosed cash injection will reportedly see Fusion-io working closely with Samsung, which is already a big player in the NAND flash market, on evaluating technology for new applications of solid-state storage.
Fusion-io specializes in fast storage devices that plug directly into PCI Express slots, rather than SSDs using traditional HDD form factors and SATA interfaces. Their enterprise-class ioDrive Duo, for instance, offers up to 640GB of storage and read rates of up to 1,500MB/s. A gamer-oriented ioXtreme version is also available for around $895, boasting 80GB of MLC storage and an average bandwidth of 520MB/s – enough to put even Intel's SLC-based X25-E Extreme drive to shame.