Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD Review
Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:28 pm
Review
I want one! (but probably won't buy one for 5 years when they are within normal people's reach)
CN's: RIDICULOUSLY fast performance for a RIDICULOUS price.The first time we looked at Fusion-io's ioDrive product, we offered the notion that it was a "disruptive technology", something that had the potential to set the industry on its ear. Of course the ioDrive is an enterprise-class product that showed the significant potential of PCI Express direct-attached SSD storage but its cost structure was such that the mainstream market couldn't possibly even begin to justify it, no matter what the upside performance looked like...
Weighing in at a pricey $899 for 80GB (standard card), it's definitely still a high ticket item but it's at least approachable now, for those of you that have the need for speed as they say...
With some help from Fusion-io and Windows Perfmon utility, we determined that ATTO was actually wrapping performance readings back around, for transfer rates hitting 1GB/sec and higher. In fact the ioXtreme RAID 0 pair chalked up what looked like 300MB/sec in some of the larger file transfers of the test, but in reality was pushing 1.3GB/sec (or 1300MB/sec) though the bar graphs and numbers were only showing the 300MB/sec or so, for read throughput. For write performance, we did observe in excess of 600MB/sec of available throughput in RAID 0 mode with a pair of ioXtreme drives.
I want one! (but probably won't buy one for 5 years when they are within normal people's reach)
I still think you're better off building a box with 16GB of RAM and setting up a RAM drive for most applications.