See all those little Samsung squares? That's NAND flash memory, 80 gigabytes worth on
Fusion-io's ioDrive. Tweaktown got an exclusive look at the PCIe storage card and came away mightily impressed by its "near nonexistent latency." It's faster than the best SATA II SSD or fastest 15,000RPM drive loaded in an 8 drive RAID config. Put simply, it's the fastest storage device they've ever tested. Tweaktown was so impressed that they proclaim, "Fusion-io has raised the bar so high that once adopted, traditional solutions will be considered legacy products." Mind you, this is enterprise class storage designed for data center servers requiring ultra-fast IO. Still, the only thing preventing you from installing it inside your own 64-bit OS (only) gaming rig is the price: the 80GB ioDrive lists for about $3,000 on up to $14,400 for the 320GB model. Yeah, expensive, but not for your CIO. Eveyone else will have to wait for the consumer model said to be in the works. Hit the read link for all the benchmarks.
posted December 11th 2008 5:30AM
If this was the boot drive, it would be instant on Vista ! or Ubuntu or whatever your poison is.. Now, if they can create a 8 GB Version for $200 , it would be worth it for an instant on computer :
Just like we have different classes of volatile memory (RAM, L1-L2-L3, GDDR), I think we'll see multiple classes of NON-volatile memory pretty quickly.
Yes, we want our O/S on a nice, speedy, low-power partition like this. Most apps should live there, too, though probably not all need to.
For at least the next few years, though, rotating media will remain cheaper per MB than NV-RAM, so what I think we'll see is a relatively small (64GB or less) "O/S" partition in tandem with rotating media.
I'm imagining a Windows machine that awakes from "Hibernation" in about 3 sec, and only gets a full reboot every couple of weeks or so. And I'm smiling.
We have one of these running in our database server.
I was a bit doubtful of the claims made for a new product from a new company, so we put one through some serious testing before we committed to using it in production.
Out of the box, I got over 400MB/s on sequential reads. Over 700MB/s on sequential or random reads with a 32KB block size. Up to 65,000 random I/Os per second, read or write, with a 4KB block size.
The worst case figures I got were with a 50/50 mix of random reads and writes, which gave me 12,000 I/Os per second.
The company posts some better benchmarks, but they were run on XFS, where I was using EXT3, which could well account for the difference.
At $3k it's not for consumers, but if you have a medium-sized database (a few tens of GB) with a high update volume, it's pretty much a silver bullet. We just took delivery of a second one. :)
They've now announced the "ioXtreme" card, at under $1000 for 80GB, to ship in Q1 next year. Presumably it's MLC, but they haven't posted any specs yet.
so nerd-horny right now
I recently had two of the 160GB cards in my HP xw8600 and striped them together. My performance benchmarks were roughly 1,400MB/s. These kinds of speeds are very handy if you're doing VisualFX compositing in stereoscopy. I could play back realtime 2K film resolutions in 3D with no problems. Normally I'd have to have a couple of 4Gb fibre attached storage units with 14 SAS drives in each to obtain the same results. For those looking to game with it, this product wasn't designed for you and neither was the pricetag ;o)
It has been a while we read about the fusion-io cards around and still no
availability to purchase one. I hope to see anytime soon a fusion-io
product offered and available to the mass. Micron is not far behind
now and they may grab the market if fusion-io does not act quickly.