Woz joins Fusion-io

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has joined Fusion-io, a start-up specializing in high-speed solid-state drives, the company said Thursday.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Wozniak will be Fusion-io's chief scientist and will also advise the company on technical strategy for product development.

"With the revolutionary technological advances being made by Fusion-io, the company is in the right place at the right time with the right technology and ready to direct the history of technology into the 21st century and beyond," Wozniak said in a statement. "The technology marketplace has not seen such capacity for innovation and radical transformation since the mainframe computer was replaced by the home computer. Fusion-io's technology is extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world's servers."

Fusion-io CEO David Flynn told CNET News in August he expects that solid-state drives will house active data while hard disk drives will go the way of tape--only being used to store data.

Given Wozniak's philosophy that engineers should follow their hearts, his move would seem to indicate that he agrees with Flynn.

Some other tech heavyweights do, too. The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company was named a Red Herring Top 100 Global company on Monday.

Fusion-io has been touted by the tech media in recent months for its ioDrive.

The ioDrive, which comes with 80GB, 160GB, or 320GB of storage, uses high-speed flash memory and can be installed alongside servers' computational chips. Fusion-io claims its ioDrive has a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 700 MB/s. Some SSD testing sites have concurred that Fusion-io's speed claims are true.

While the high-speed, solid-state drives are intended for data center servers, rumors have spread across the Internet that a version of Fusion-io's technology for personal consumers may be in the works.

Storage and servers are not glamorous work. But if Wozniak could do for storage what he did for the personal computer, the tech industry may have another positive revolution on its hands.

No word on whether Wozniak plans to appear in New York on March 3 at the Storage Virtualization 2009 Seminar Series of which Fusion-io is a sponsor. Given this news, a lot more people will probably be signing up to attend.

[dascha1]

I give him credit and knew he'd pop up today at some point (aka. Mr. Disner Tracker). Then again, let's not forget that he "can't imagine" safety apps for monitoring children, elderly and pets in an automobile (hot and cold cars), nor a "long ways to go" before a device can hear you across a crowded room and recognize your voice.

A true pioneer at heart though. Thanks for co-founding Apple Computer Corp.

[Get_Bent]

I wouldn't classify the ioDrive a "drive": it's a PCI Express card with flash RAM on board. This is more like a cross between a true SSD drive and a RAM disk, or maybe a modern-day rendition of the old hard-drive-on-a-card.

[john_J_rambo_25]

Wow, the Woz has joined this horrible company?! I hope this gives them a better product because I have had 4 io drives and had to RMA them all. I am currently on my fifth drive, and even then it doesn't perform as fast as what they claim. If I had to do it again I would never have bought this product to begin with. Hopefully the Woz has the hardware experience to pull this companies head out! (I doubt it, when was the last time wozniak worked with hardware......the 80's.....i think it's gone beyond his scope now. Besides he hasn't been all there since the plane crash. Merely a figure head.