Slashdot Mirror
Fusion-io IoXtreme's Consumer-Class PCIe SSD — Impressive Throughput
MojoKid writes "When Fusion-io's first ioDrive product hit the market, it was claimed to be a 'disruptive technology' by some industry analysts, with the potential to set the storage industry on its ear. Of course the first version of the ioDrive was an enterprise-class product that showed the significant potential of PCI Express direct-attached SSD storage, but its cost was such that the mainstream market couldn't possibly justify it, no matter what the upside performance looked like. Then we heard of Fusion-io's more consumer-targeted play, the ioXtreme, that was announced this past summer. Fusion-io has only very recently released these new, lower cost cards to market. The first-ever full performance review of the product over at HotHardware shows the half-height PCI Express X4 cards are capable of a robust 800MB/sec read bandwidth and about 300MB/sec of write bandwidth. The cards particularly excel versus a standard SSD at random read/write requests and even perform relatively well with small block transfers."
This is the proper place for memory, on the system bus.
Putting memory behind a drive controller is just like making your gas pedal respond to a buggy whip (OK, car analogies aren't my strong point).
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
I bought a SATA SSD which can read and write at around 200MB/s. It was the greatest upgrade I've ever done, and for just $200 (less than my CPU or GPU). Now, I can't stand waiting for things to load when I have to work using mechanical hard drives.
If 200MB/s is that big a difference, 800MB/s is going to be... actually probably not that much better. My computer already feels "instant."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I got the Kingston v-series 64M for around $120--I think it's only rated around 100MB. Still feels a lot faster, especially after boot-up.
It still has many of the limitations that the original FusionIO cards have: It's pricey at $11/GB (although not astronomical like the original products), and you still can't boot off of it. This means you'll need at least one old fashioned drive with the OS on it to get your machine going, which is a shame because the system files can often make good use of SSD performance.
On paper, I don't think the performance difference between this and something like an Intel X-25m is going to justify the 4 fold price difference. When people went from their laptop HDD to the Intel drive, they often saw startup times and whatnot go from multiple (tens!) of seconds to less than a second. This card is likely to push them from less than a second to a smaller less than a second, it's just not worth it to most people.
I read the internet for the articles.
First off, late in the article they show that game level load times are faster with these PCIx SSDs. Left For Dead loads about twice as quick with the Fusion IOXtreme. So the end user would notice a difference (especially as time goes on and apps become more and more bloated)
One thing this product does effectively illustrate is that SATA 6 is already obsolete. All this card really is is the same grade of memory chips that goes in a lesser SSD like an Intel X-25M. The difference is that the controller gangs together 25 channels instead of just 10 like the Intel product. The controller isn't even that high performance a part - it's using an FPGA. An ASIC version of the chip could be cheaply fabbed using technology several generations back. So, in the long run, the cost to design and manufacture a PCIx SSD is virtually identical to the cost of a SATA SSD. And SATA 6 is already too slow for SSDs to use (and too fast of an interface for a mechanical hard drive)
All in all, I predict that in a few more years, basically all SSDs sold will use a PCIx interface to connect to the host PC. Laptop manufacturers will have to change their internal mounting scheme slightly. And, prices should fall drastically from the $900 this IoXtreme is MSRPing at.
Unfortunately, a bit of a let-down for some might be, that the product still currently can't be utilized as a boot volume.
That means you still need some other drive (probably an "old" SATA SSD) to boot from. You can then load all your apps (and probably even some parts of the OS with a little hacking) onto this beast, but you still can't use it as your primary drive.
Fusion-io assures us that this feature will be supported in future driver and/or firmware revisions but also didn't commit to a schedule for that roll-out just yet.
Hopefully it comes along soon and at no cost for the early adopters of this item. I'd love to see these become the standard, but it doesn't really fit for me at the moment. As stated above, the jump from HDD to SATA SSD is a much larger percentage increase than SATA SSD to PCIe SSD, and cheaper too.
In looking at similar items pricing, sorry, don't care if it displays information before I think to ask for it..
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
This ioXtreme is rated at 80 microseconds, while the Intel X25-M G2 is rated at 50 microseconds.
For about $900, or the cost of the Fusion ioXtreme 80GB card, I bought two Intel 160GB SSD drives that I have in a RAID 0 configuration. It's very fast and 4X the capacity for the same price. Oh, and it's bootable.
No difference in rated read latency over SATA SSDs. Bummer. That's the primary improvement SSD's have made over mechanical drives.
80GB is small
The link in the slashdot is only to page 4 and one datapoint. Here's the main page: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Review/
You don't really still need the spinning media. There's a cheap, incredibly easy, fast and inexpensive media that's perfect for booting your computer, and your computer is loaded with ports for it. It's called a USB thumbdrive.
It's pretty simple actually: they're cheap and easily available in all kinds of different sizes ranging from "I just need to boot Linux" (256MB) to "I want all of my apps on it too" (32GB+), they're writable so you can update the OS, and you've likely got a multitude of ports inside of your computer that go completely wasted because they're not connected to anything (and a pigtail for one of these is a nickel at a computer store, if your motherboard didn't come with a few in the box). Just plug it in, plug in the USB drive, install your OS on it, and be done. You can choose to swap to it or the faster media at your own discretion.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
And five years from now, they'll be dusty leftovers found in plastic bins at the local electronics surplus shop. If you can even find them.
Ten years from now, people will hold them up and squint at them and wonder what they were originally built to do. Computer cards all look the same. The only notable thing about these ones is that they don't have any ports on the back. After a couple seconds of interest, they'll get tossed back into the bin.
No real point to this post, other than the "gosh" factor. It just still amazes me how quickly consumer tech ripens and rots.
-FL
The price tag vs capacity and limitations makes this a worthless purchase for ANY Serious minded individual.
Hotswap isn't really a viable option for failed devices.
RAID if possible would not be conventional or standardized.
Price tag is completely stupid, especially when you can have an Intel x25 80 gig for much less in cost.
Most people are awe inspired and fooled by the grand total throughput of this thing at 800MB/s. Let me tell you, that is not really all that impressive. Just 8 HDD's could turn that number in a pure linear read test. Yes, I know some of you are going to say that well... thats 8 drive this is just 1! let me include you on a little secret! SSD's are exactly RAID-0 devices when you consider internal devices. That is how they get really fast when it comes to reading large amounts of data. However... the truth comes out when you put an SSD to a 1kb read & write test. You can bring even a good SSD down to 5MB/s of throughput. Now to put that in perspective, the very same test on a HDD can easily bring it down to 0.5MB/s of throughput.
Even if a single HDD could turn out 1 terabyte per second it still would not be able to touch an SSD in real performance or in perceived performance. And here is why. Go to your OS system folders and look at how big the files are. Over 50% of the system files are under 100Kb in size. Now how fast can an SSD get that file to you vs an SSD. Keeping it simple a good raptor HDD will take about 3ms and the SSD would take about 0.1ms. That is more that just an order of magnitude faster. It is easily 30 times faster than the HDD. Now lets pretend there are over 5,000 of those files to read!
HDD read
5,000 x 3ms = 15,000 MS equal to 15 seconds of time you have to wait to get all those files opened!
If each file is 100Kb then you will have read 500 Megs of data over 15 seconds which is roughly 33MB/s. Even though drives like this could do 120 Megs a second, it only gave you 33% of its peak limit.
SSD read
5,000 x 0.1ms = 500 MS equal to about 0.5 seconds of time you have to wait to get all those files opened!
If each file is 100Kb then you will have read 500 Megs of Data over less than a second which is roughly 500MB/s. Of course a SATA bus can take about 260+/- Megs a second so it would take more like 2~3 seconds to get that data opened to you, but it is still much faster than the HDD's latency and you literally get much closer to your drives peak limit.
In the end result, in real world applications just a single SSD can out perform even 16 RAID HDD's if the transactions are small and numerous! Which coincidentally, actually happens A LOT on every system whether it be a desktop or a database.
Now considering that for $800 you can easily get about 4 60 gigs SSD's with 200MB/s read and 130MB/s write speeds each you will not only have a very nasty fast drive that is 800MB/s Read and 520MB/s write in RAID-0 you will also have 240 gigs of space which is about 3 times the capacity for the same price! You could even get some hotswap and a RAID 5 for some redundancy and 180 gigs of space!
Face it, this sort of technology is just not 'ready' yet. Keep to the SATA bus. It still has plenty of bandwidth for LAS applications and is in no need of going anywhere!
http://www.coolforsale.com/ Best quality, Best reputation , Best services Our commitment, customer is God. Quality is our Dignity; Service is our Lift. Ladies and Gentlemen weicome to my coolforsale.com.Here,there are the most fashion products . Pass by but don't miss it.Select your favorite clothing! Welcome to come next time ! Thank you! Air jordan(1-24)shoes $33 Nike shox(R4,NZ,OZ,TL1,TL2,TL3) $35 Handbags(Coach lv fendi d&g) $35 Tshirts (Polo ,ed hardy,lacoste) $16 free shipping competitive price any size available accept the paypal Thanks
You have to ask yourself, what do you need that kind of speed for vs a more portable, hot-swappable, and likely longer-lived SATA/E-SATA standard? Maybe a transactional store for a database, but that is pretty much it. A PCI-e style interface would be relegated only to those situations where extreme performance is required. Such devices will always be priced at a premium over their SATA counterparts simply by virtue of their lower volume production.
I do have an interest in how well a SSD could be used to expand the effective physical memory for a machine under load. Say, for an applet server. Another possible use would as a disk cache fronting slower multi-terrabyte HD storage. A PCI-e based device might be an improvement over SATA for that sort of thing though probably not enough of an improvement to justify the difference in cost. The real limitation to using a flash device as another caching layer is not performance but instead wear on the flash chips.
-Matt
You sound intelligent, so I'll assume you'll keep researching the subject and you'll eventually realize the flaws in your argument.
Go ahead and string a bunch of regular SSDs together and see if your theories hold water. Without wear-leveling, grooming, and other advanced controller functions, they'll fail long before the Fusion-io drive.
Cost is not only measured in $/GB. $/transaction counts in a lot of environments. Power consumption matters in a lot of environments. Fusion-io drives are already more cost effective than spinning media, as illustrated in the MySpace case study they released a few weeks ago, and they're only going to get better. The math is pretty simple when 1 server with Fusion-io drives can out-perform 10 servers with other media.
Of course, it isn't for everybody. Yet.
It was a RAM drive that went in the old Epson QX-10 and QX-16 computers. I remember when we dropped one of those in the old QX-10 and TP/M and ValDocs launched almost instantly. And two freakin' megabytes of storage. It was HUGE!!! And the battery backup could keep your data safe for a good 6 hours without power.
ok assuming home use you're still going to need to have a spinning disk for two reasons: 1. you still need a place to put the bootloader, might as well have it on the disk because your going to have the disk anyway because of: 2. You still the large capacity drive to hold all of you pron/movies/music.