The new 80 GB ioXtreme from Fusion-io was recently displayed at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, LA. The ioXtreme is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x4 PCI Express slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express slot is that you can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can achieve a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 280 MB/s. The best SSD for a performance comparison is the 64 GB Intel X-25E. The Intel SSD achieves a write bandwidth of 170 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 250 MB/s. The price for the X-25E is currently running about $700. The ioXtreme is favorably priced at $895.
The ioXtreme is meant for home gaming systems, which means there are some limits to the drive. The ioXtreme is limited to 64-bit Windows operating systems. That means a home user can only use 64-bit Windows XP or Vista. (If you are using 64-bit Windows XP for gaming, you need to have your head examined.)
Another limitation is that you can only RAID two of the drives together. This is a limit that is enforced by the driver. It is meant to keep people from putting several of these drives together to compete with the enterprise offerings from Fusion-io. The ioDrive and the ioDriveDuo are their enterprise offerings. These drives offer higher performance, support 64-bit Linux, and have a 3 year warranty. Meanwhile the ioXtreme comes with a 1 year warranty.
There are internal differences as well between the ioXtreme and their enterprise offerings. While it is unlikely that you will lose a chip on the ioXtreme, should that occur, you will lose your data. On the enterprise side, the ioDrives have more memory chips than needed. If a memory chip fails internally on the ioDrives, they have hardware that will detect the failure, and use one of the spare chips instead. Fusion-io claims that the ioDrives have a lifespan of 16 years, while the ioXtreme will have a shorter lifespan. For all its increased performance, engineering, and warranty, the enterprise ioDrives comes with an increased price that starts at $3,600 for the 80GB model.
Update 9/17/09: I was recently contact by FusionIO requesting a correction on some of the data in this article.
- Read Bandwidth 697 MB/s (64 KB packets)
- Write Bandwidth 288 MB/s (64 KB packets)
And a short statement:
Though gamers will see incredible performance improvements using the ioXtreme, the market that will likely find the device most useful are content creators, digital media artists and other workstation users. Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, manipulating massive files, ripping multiple DVDs and installing a new application — all simultaneously.
I double checked the write and read bandwidth on one of the ioXtreme handouts from SIGGRAPH. It clearly states that that their drive can achieve a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 280 MB/s. Now, of course, it could be a printing error…
Good point on the PCI Express 2.0 but how many of their 640GB drives do you need to stack together to get the capacity you want? Four of those drives is 2.4TB of capacity and this ioxtreme drive shows the price is at least heading in the right direction for most of us folks.
Seriously two of these ioxtreme drives are equal to like 8 OCZ drive. So when the price comes down a bit more if my choice is 16-32 OCZ or Intel drives compared to 2-4 fours of these ioxtremes I guess I’ll be picking these ioxtremes to do my film work.
One wonders what the future holds for Fusion-io. They are doing great in the performance department, and yet they are only using PCI Express version 1.1, and not the faster 2.0 spec. By moving to 2.0, they can double the available bandwidth at the interface level, but what other bottlenecks will they encounter within the drive itself.
While the performance is great, how do you stack together a bunch of these in a server platform? Most motherboards (with a few exceptions) only come with 3 or 4 PCI Express interfaces. My guess would be that they build a PCI Express extender, like they showed at SIGGRAPH, and have the actual SSD drives sit in drive bays.
But then that means they look like every other vendor. It will be interesting to see what happens.
The ioXtreme is $895 which is cheaper than two Intel X25 32GB drives and faster too.
@Mr.Script
Lifeguard will have to chime in for certain, but I’m pretty sure that the solid-state chips used in the FusionIO card isn’t the same used in the run-of-the-mill SSD’s available from other companies. These are higher-bandwidth with more writes available per chip, plus improved error detection and correction.
Fusion IO shouldn’t cost that much.
$7210 for 160GB is ridiculous. Only because it’s new and demandable it cost such money. 160GB of NAND memory cost less than $500 for 160GB + that controller which can be comparable to any PCIe x4 SAS controller available today. So, we’ll just wait for couple of years. Of course businesses that need this technology to change their SCSI/SAS hard drive will definitely get advantage from Fusion IO drives.
I think it’s actually supposed to be 500MB reads and 250MB writes. At least according to their website.