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Comments: 110 +- Hardware: Fusion-io IoXtreme's Consumer-Class PCIe SSD — Impressive Throughput on Monday November 16, @04:40PM
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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."
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In the right place (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:In the right place (Score:5, Funny)
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).
Yeah, no kiddin. I mean if the whip has bugs in it, isn't that a driver issue?
Parent
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That was perfect. Thank you.
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SATA does have its advantages, though: laptop support, bootability, hot-swap, cross-platform (no drivers needed), etc.
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A proper PCIe (miniPCIe) card supports bootability (appears as a regular controller+disk), laptops often boot from miniPCIe SSDs (netbooks notably - Asus eeePC and the SSD Acer Ones, amongst others). Hot swap not so much (I know SATA supports it, but do real world motherboard controllers support it?), though I suppose if someone were to make it an ExpressCard design, possibly. Cross-platform
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The ioDrive/ioXtreme doesn't appear as a regular IDE or AHCI controller because that would significantly degrade its performance; most of Fusion-io's "special sauce" is in the driver.
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But as long as it has a bios extention rom on it that knows how to make basic use of the interface (it doesn't have to be particulally fast, just good enough to let the OS kernel/drivers be loaded by the bootloader) then it should be bootable.
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Most motherboards these days do implement SATA hotplugging. In fact, it's pretty important for eSATA.
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Most netbooks I know about use a modified minipcie pinset, with usb and sata onboard that most cards use, rather than actual minipcie.
sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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It's the read latency, not MB/s that's most important for desktop usage or for most databases. Everybody quotes the numbers that they're used to quoting, but the game is different with SSDs.
Re:Latency (Score:3, Informative)
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And the worthless JMicron controller SSDs probably have read latencies under 100 microseconds as well.
It's not read latency that matters at all, it's total THROUGHPUT for the smallest, random, reads and writes.
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It's not read latency that matters at all, it's total THROUGHPUT for the smallest, random, reads and writes.
And that throughput is dominated by latency in HDDs. Much less so for SSDs.
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It's not read latency that matters at all, it's total THROUGHPUT for the smallest, random, reads and writes.
For one thing, in a hard disk, seek latency dominates for throughput for random loads. SSDs improve throughput by cutting latency. For another, interactive tasks demand high throughput on a burst of transactions, which needs low latency.
Re:sweet (Score:4, Funny)
Instant, or is there a "speed of light [xkcd.com]" delay?
Parent
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Only if you get him on the first try!
Believe me, it's kind of hard - and the hardest part can be knowing if you actually hit it.
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It's not the throughput you're noticing. It's the seek latency, at which SSDs are many times faster (comparing Intel's X-25M to WD's 10K RPM Velociraptor, you're looking at about 65x faster. Comparing to a 7200rpm drive, you're looking at about 100x difference.) than mechanical drives.
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and my rebuttle to your post (copied and pasted from my reply to someone on another forum)
I recently installed 2 of the 120gb Agility OCZ drives in RAID0 - apparently SSD's scale better with raid than a regular hard disk. .7mb/s in such tests)
I can read at 390mb/s write at 220mb/s and the random 4k reads and writes are about 23mb/s (regular disks can do about
According to benchmarks, a single OCZ disk is pretty darn close to the intel in the real world performance tests and one can only guess that 2 of them
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With a mechanical disk, you must wait on apps to load. With a fast SSD, they load as fast as you click. That is a huge difference. Your train of thought is never derailed due to disk waits.
There is no cure for net latency yet. This is irrelevant. My computer works as fast as I think, and I love that!
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I know all this, search for my history on disks - I know how they work, I know about latency, I know which portions of disk operations should be quicker and I'm telling you, on a high end machine with a 7200RPM disk and 6gb of ram the difference is negligable, especially on a quad core rig which used a 2gb readyboost disk.
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I'm waiting until they hit my price point of under $1/GB for the better units. MLC based SSDs are still up around $2.25 to $2.45 per gigabyte for the low-end stuff, with the better MLC in the $2.50 to $3.25 per gigabyte range. I think the best spot price I've seen yet is around $1.90 for MLC.
At $1/GB, I'd quickly replace the 2.5" SATA
Still can't boot off of it. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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.
I have a Linux machine that boots off a hard drive (i.e. bootloader and kernel) and the rest of the system runs on a SSD. The HD can then spin down until next boot. I guess other real operating systems can do this too.
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Wrong actually.
I have mounted the Program Files (x86), the Users and the UserData folders as HDD partitions mounted via NTFS folders to these points, and it means your system boots and runs some apps as fast as the SSD can let it, but for storage of big files and junk, the rust takes over.
Still workable (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Erm. Booting Windows 7 off of a USB thumbdrive? (you'd need that 32GB model)
Dunno, doesn't sound like a very good idea. The OS is huge, and needs lots and lots of IO accesses, both for booting and during normal operation. Thumbdrives generally aren't really designed for that kind of continuous use. And finally, the slowdown from waiting to boot would possibly cause more lost time than you'd gain from having an $800 PCI-express card for your application files.
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In this instance, "booting the PC" doesn't necessarily mean "loading all of the system files." Mainly just means getting the system up to the point that you're then pulling system (e.g. \windows files) off of the SSD.
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Making sure that "the code" is present, and actually functions, on god-knows-how-many motherboards, each with its own BIOS horror show, is probably pretty tricky.
By far the easiest way is simply emulating an SATA controller; but then you would lose out on the assorted FusionIO special sauce and might as well just buy the cheaper intel drives and plug them into your
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PCI (including PCIe) devices can supply a bios extention rom to make themselves bootable, afaict this is how most scsi and sata cards make themselves bootable.
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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is intended to eventually replace PCI and PCIx (for example the FC HBA and the SAS controller in my new Precision T5500 workstation are PCI-E rather than the PCIx that was in my old PowerEdge 2650)
Afaict PCIe has already practically killed PCIx, take your precision workstation for example, four PCIe slots but only one PCIx.
At the low end PCIe x1 cards/slots don't seem to be doing so well though, while lots of machines have at least one slot I don't think i've ever seen a card in person (and the cards i've s
One major issue with it (Score:2)
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
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You just need to load the kernel from some other medium. An old hard drive, a USB stick, an old flash card or something.
Unless you're running a truly backwards OS like Windows. Then, yeah, you have to put a lot of stuff on your boot drive.
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It sounds to me more likely that they skimped big time on the hardware end, than that they met up with a technical limitation.
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I've got to try this again, but back in the day you could install on a drive that Windows had a driver for, but the BIOS couldn't boot as long as you had a small NTFS/FAT partition on a drive the BIOS COULD boot to hold the bootloader and driver... So you primary drive/OS would live on the SSD, and that legacy pile of junk hanging off your ATA port could be a tired piece of CF for all Windows could care.
Price ? (Score:2)
For about $900 (Score:2)
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You are uninformed. The drives are fast enough that they hit the cap for a single SATA connection.
Here's a review of 16 Intel drives in raid-0
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-6gb-raid,2388.html [tomshardware.com]
Its not quite 1600% faster but its about 1300% faster than the peak transfer rate of a single SATA connection.
Then again.. if you really wanted performance for cheap, you could get 8 of the new 40 gig Kingston (intel based) drives and raid-0 them for the same price as the Fusion ioXtreme card. I'd challenge so
Direct link to first page of the article is here: (Score:2)
Two years from now, these will cost $25 (Score:2)
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
The speed has limited usefulness (Score:2)
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