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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.
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.
This ioXtreme is rated at 80 microseconds, while the Intel X25-M G2 is rated at 50 microseconds.