SSD maker Fusion-io has introduced its ioFX PCIe-based solid-state drive for workstations that contains 420GB of storage. Meant for HD video editing in the movie industry for special effects work, the card uses a less costly internal design than other Fusion-io cards. There are four flash channels, or a quad-die package, so there is half of the write I/O per second performance of the previous products.

The ioFX is still much faster than conventional SSDs, coming rated at about 1.4GBps read and 700MBps write speeds. Latency is 68ms when reading and 15ms for writing. The card also has a cooling fan integrated, like some conventional high-end graphics cards, and unlike the server-centric ones that came before it.

Windows 7 and some Windows Server versions can use the cards, along with Linux and Mac OS X.

The ioFX card will cost $2,495 but include one year of support when it ships later this spring. It's less than half the price of Fusion-io's server card, the ioDrive2, which costs $5,950.