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."

Still can't boot off of it.

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Latency

[InvisiBill]

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

Re:In the right place

[tlhIngan]

SATA does have its advantages, though: laptop support, bootability, hot-swap, cross-platform (no drivers needed), etc.

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/no drivers if it appears as a regular IDE controller+disk.

Booting of SATA is effectively booting off a PCIe card - the SATA controller hangs off the PCIe bus (or virutal PCIe for on-chipset controllers - but they still enumerate the same as normal PCI(e) devices).