Intel Intros 310 Series Mini SSDs

crookedvulture writes "Intel has added a couple of tiny 310 Series solid-state drives to its storage lineup. Measuring just 51 x 30 x 5.8mm, the mini-SATA SSDs are about a tenth the size of a standard notebook hard drive. Impressively, their performance ratings track with full-sized SSDs. Intel is pushing the 310 Series as a solution for dual-drive notebooks that combine solid-state and mechanical storage to give users the best of both worlds. Next-gen notebooks just got a little more interesting."

Re:Windows

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It goes back at least as far as XP, probably 2000 if you don't need the Fisher-Price skin...

Now, just to get back to the bigotry and one-upsmanship, any setup that forces the user to think about how best to allocate filesystem stuff between block devices, or forces them to commit to one inflexible configuration, is arguably underutilizing the capabilities of this sort of technology.

Machines are, unless the human really wants to, supposed to handle the grunt work(not to mention, keeping accurate track of file accesses, speed and latency of multiple devices, etc. properly is really beyond the capabilities of a human, at least in realtime).

What you really want is an FS arrangement that can seamlessly present you with a single logical volume, silently handling the details of what to commit to flash and what to platter, for optimal performance and responsiveness without the cost of going all Flash.

Re:Drat

[Rockoon]

OCZ has 740MB/s cards for an order of magnitude less (Save $7000 and spend only $650) than than Fusion I/O's offering, and with 50% more capacity too (240GB card)

For cards in the price range you are talking about, OCZ delivers 1400MB/s on its 512GB card.

You seem to be less informed than you realize.

Re:Drat

[sr180]

Yes, we've been evaulating the OCZ Cards - and they are much slower in real life then the benchmarks suggest. Note that the FusionIO has a FusionIO Duo - which pulls 1.5GBytes a sec. This seems to be the holy grail of speed atm.

Re:Drat

[bobcat7677]

Having worked with sets of comparable cards from Fusion IO and OCZ (IOXtreme and Zdrive), I can give this assessment:

Neither card met the published performance numbers. But the Fusion I/O card came closer to it's published numbers then the OCZ card in basic benchmarks making the Fusion I/O card quite a bit faster for raw throughput. Both cards were blazingly fast though pushing MBps and IOps like no tomorrow.

Real world performance suffered greatly with the Fusion I/O cards due to their software driven architecture. The CPU overhead was significant, even on a powerful multi CPU Xeon server. The OCZ cards did not have this problem.
The Price/performance ratio in real world made OCZ the winner overall. The competition was closest when excluding CPU overhead, but once you include CPU overhead the OCZ cards win hands down.
Support was highly disappointing from Fusion I/O. With OCZ you expect minimal support, but I expected something better from the "premium" Fusion I/O brand (and price point). Unfortunately, their support was no better then OCZ.
We originally evaluated the original Zdrive model which was kindof a rough implementation of the technology. If you are going to buy one now, avoid the old Zdrives...there are several problems with their design. The new R2 Zdrives have fixed these problems and are sold at basically the same price point for similar specs.

We eventually returned the Fusion I/O cards due to their ridiculous CPU penalty. We still have the OCZ cards, but have stopped using them in favor of normal SAS controllers with hot swap SSD drives. It's just not convenient to shut down a server and crack open the case just to replace a failed SSD...and SSDs do fail:) At this point, PCIe SSD cards seem better suited to high end workstation applications where it's not as big of a deal to crack open the box for maintenance.