Comments on: What does Woz see in solid-state drives?

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is joining Fusion-io as chief scientist. The company's chief technology officer provides some insight into what Woz can expect.

[jonathan0766]

Wozniak is obviously for nothing but public attention acquisition (which worked, as this article is proof of). A whole lot of engineers at Fusion-io just rolled their eyes at the idea he is helping "change the architecture and focus of our technology." Gimme a break. The Woz has been washed up for two decades.

[inachu]

google for his internet printer and send him a personal message.

[Mr. Dee]

Shouldn't Mr. Wozniak be preparing for his Dancing with the Stars gig? I am sure he will be the first one kicked off. How much money does he have by the way? He seems to invest in a lot of startups, many which have failed or are just experimental without a hit in sight.

[Jon N.]

Y'all need to give Mr. Wozniak some respect! First, he IS the co-founder of the second most used platform in computing. He literally designed the Apple II! In his garage back in '76, the two Steves (Wozniak & Jobs) were building them by hand, and turned the whole thing into a standards industry! Let's see you do that! Second, I'm pretty sure he is doing the "Dancing with the Stars" gig to get in better shape. He's a bit on the weighty side, and this will knock it right off, as well as give computing a boost, as well. As for me, I'll be voting for him, because it's hard enough learning how to dance, but when you're weight challenged, it's doubly hard. I know. I used to be severely overweight. Y'all need to start respecting your elders!

[Mr. Dee]

Most Americans don't even know who Steve Jobs is, much less Steve Wozniak. When I ask people, do you know who Bill Gates is? They reply, 'Sure, the billionaire who started his Company in his parents garage.

[Mergatroid Mania]

He's not my elder, and Apple was just a footnote until the IPOD.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

@both Mr. Dee and Mergatriod Mania,

Woz is known everywhere, believe it or not. He's in almost every college computing textbook I had to read for my degree. Furthermore, Steve Jobs is known because SNL even made fun of him. So your points are moot.

Also, Woz came up with the idea for a computer for the AVERAGE person. The Altair 8800 had no way to interface with, unless you wanted to flip those "damned" switches, as Bob Cringely pointed out. Woz took a keyboard like the mainframes had and used it for input on the Apple I. The US Government awarded him a patent for it, which is still valid today.

And then the super-success that Woz had with Apple II paved the way for the Lisa, which had a GUI, which is what Windows uses. In fact, decompile the Windows Vi$ta code and you'll see the pirated DRI and Apple Lisa codes inside, doing nothing. This was discussed on a 1.5 year old episode of TWiT.

You owe everything to Woz in this modern day an age, or otherwise, computers would still be like the Altair and just be video game systems.

[CNET editors' note: Personal attacks edited out.]

[traxx09]

Everyone needs to hold off on their deification of Woz. BtmnHatesRbn I don't know if you're trying to say that Woz is responsible for GUI, but if you are then that's not true. If you're gonna say MS ripped off Apple, then you might as well say that Apple ripped of Xerox. It was the Xerox PARC division that came up with the mouse and the GUI. Everyone ripped it off of them, not Apple. So I'd say we owe everything to Xerox and not Woz, although I think he does have a brilliant mind.

[FemaleOpinon]

The two Steve's didn't design them hand and hand... Woz designed it... Jobs went and got Markkula to invest and he marketed it. Jobs has taken way too much credit in the design side, where people who were on the inside know that Woz was the chief engineer in a big way! But Jobs knows how to market things big time, which is partially why Apple has done so well, they design for the user. Woz never was much on getting accolades, he just likes to share knowledge. Steve W's brother (Mark) was in business with some partners and started the first apple store (I worked there in something like '79... The folks in Cupertino / Sunnyvale etc, knew who was the technical genius. I think Jobs has certainly grown up well... but just because Steve W doesn't like the whole notariety and publicity thing doesn't mean that he isn't still brilliant... people should at least respect that. Heck the guy got a perfect score on his SAT's... twice! How many of us can say that! And people who don't know who Steve Wozniak is, don't know because he isn't a very public guy... although he cares a lot about public TV and the arts, and all those folks know him well. There is no reason for disrespecting him and lots of reasons to respect and admire him.

[Notoapplefanbois]

Well actually mac os does not have a place in the most popular os since it is a version of linux.

[scottthesculptor]

$8900 per 320GB?

Makes sense in the long run.
Like solar power.
Nice if you can afford the initial outlay.

Fast throughput, low power consumption, high reliability.

Flash prices keep falling . . .
Everyone will be using flash drives at some point.
And they'll get them from the same manufacturers that fusionio buys theirs from . . .

[rapier1]

Well, this isn't for the home market or even mid sized businesses. This is a product aimed directly at enterprise applications where even a marginal performance advantage can translate into savings of millions of dollars.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

You can buy HDSD IDE or SATA adapters for your computers, plug in like 4 32 GB SDHD cards and have a very nice, fast, low-power, reliable hard "disk".

[AnthonyNYC]

by BtmnHatesRbn February 25, 2009 11:10 AM PST
You can buy HDSD IDE or SATA adapters for your computers, plug in like 4 32 GB SDHD cards and have a very nice, fast, low-power, reliable hard "disk".

There is no need to go through all that trouble, on a home PC, you can now just purchse a 120gb, 2.5" SSD, Solid Sttae Drive from newegg for about $270 and that's it, no need to get expensive 32gb flash SDHC chips, which are much slower by the way than an SSD, which even a slow model gets 150 gb read and write and an amazing 0.2miliseconds access time, blowing away even the WD Raptors great 8.9millisecond access time.

[TotalKonfuzion]

"He seems to invest in a lot of startups, many which have failed or are just experimental without a hit in sight." ---Errr....if he didn't invest his time and money companies like Apple would have never existed.

"The Woz has been washed up for two decades." ---Okay...what's this have to do with him overseeing a project? He's a very intelligent guy and if you read up on your history..you'd realize that we owe a lot to him.

Let the man invest in what he wants and I'm glad he's doing something again...good for him.

[Mr. Dee]

Actually, Apple is his only success to date. If it wasn't for Steve Jobs, the Apple I would remain a hobby.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

@Mr. Dee

Woz also gives his time to schools and charity, and he never loses money in the traditional sense. Sour games you have. Look, you don't like it, then fine, but you don't have to post things out of your butt.

[Mergatroid Mania]

How does building a computer in your garage qualify one for a position as "Chief Scientist"? As far as I'm concerned, Woz isn't a scientist at all. Perhaps "Chief Home-Brew Engineer" would be more accurate.

Also, please don't compare this product to 3DFX, ATI and NVIDIA, as these companies made 3D available to the masses at reasonable costs. These solid state drives this company is making are no where near affordable to the masses. Sure, when 3DFX came out with their 3D add-on cards, they were expensive, but no where near $30 per gig. That's $3000 for a 100G drive. How this can be considered cost effective....I don't know. They must be saving an awful lot of energy for power consumption and cooling to make $3000 for a 100G drive cost effective.

Also, haven't we just been reading about one companies SSD that is slowing down as it gets older? Might want to beta test these drives for a little longer too.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

What is your problem, seriously? Answer that. The article is dead-on. Shrek was made on OTC HPs with 8 MB video cards, before being cleaned up. And, since I worked at Westwood Studios in the 1990s, we bought tons of the 2 MB cards to do all of the video and polygonal rendering for the games. Did you ever work at a game company that rendered anything? Have you? I have. I was there when we refused to rent anything from SGI or Cray and just wrote and built our own 3D card in 1992 from 386 chips using a PCI slot from parts we bought with Virgin Interactive's money at the local CompUSA.

[Sourdust]

Using your logic Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were never qualified to be CEOs and should not have been. In fact, Silicon Valley would not exist if you were in charge. Actually, it might, but it would be run like other companies that only go for "qualified" leaders. You know, like Wall Street and the auto makers.

[martin1212]

You're way off. The markets being compared are the high end ones. So a $50k SGI system was replaced with a $5k system containing a $3k graphics card for use in high end animation. That's the replacement market being talked about here. In that sense the replacement of disk-based SANs with SSD-based ones is exactly analagous. Don't relate everything to the home/hobbyist user.

[pentest]

These aren't for the masses and where they are useful the speed gains are definitely worth the price.

You mind is in the desktop world, where performance is a minor issue(even with gamers) compared to the area this product is aimed at.

[dutch_guilder]

$3000 is peanuts for make a 100GB run 10x faster. In most organizations the database is always the bottleneck, and running a database costs $20-200k for the software + another $20-200k for the hardware + another $100k/yr for an admin. Spending another $3k to greatly improve the performance is a no brainer.

[houltmac]

I think that just putting Woz' name against SSD will help the chain begin to take it seriously. It's a great thing and I would bet that Woz is personally very excited about the prospect. Great news.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

Wow knows something we don't. This guy took apart an early VCR in 1971 to see how it worked, and made it better. He also does scooter-polo. But seriously, this guy created the first large-capacity affordable floppy disk drive and controller card, so he knows something more than we do.

And Woz is a scientist, as we went back to college in the 1980s and got his degree.

[k23232323]

If he gets SSD stranded in some minimacbook then SSD will become far more popular, and with some decent capacity.

Idk, keeping in mind, this dude invented the home computer( for real people) we all owe him a certain amount of respect.

Now how did we get to today when windows is 93% or more of the world market is clear, woz left the company.

Only when the ipod came out and apple re-branded them selves as cool( plus running windows helped) did apple come back, and even now apple makes most of its money on ipods/iphones.

[catbutt5]

$30 per gigabyte would be fair if they had actually created a 'Silicon SAN' which they haven't.
A SAN's (Storage Area Network) purpose is to be shared storage for multiple computers simultaneously.
What they have created is DAS (Direct Attached Storage) which commands a far, far, far lower price... nowhere near the 3000 times the average price he quotes - $30/gig versus $.10/gig - 1 terabyte drives can be had for $100 or less, even "enterprise" SAS (Serial Attached Storage) 1 TB drives can be had for $200.
What surprises me is that every RAID card manufacturer hasn't jumped on Fusion's bandwagon. Especially considering their ridiculous profit margins and the observing that their card is nothing more than a RAID card with direct attached flash memoty and no need for slow hard drive interfaces.

[nicmart]

"What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don't?" The reporter asked the question, but he didn't provide an answer.

[Kainchild]

With the economy the way it is today, they actually expect people to pay 30 dollars a gig. I bet those business who were paying 50 a gig are changing over to that cheaper version just to save some money. Businesses aren't the big money makers they use to be and people who are sellers have to realize that when they decide to put out these prices.

[ethieda]

I can't wait to see these hit the stores!