Review of the
Fusion-IO IODrive 80GB Solid State Drive (SSD)
page 1
Introduction
The wait is finally over.
Fusion-IO has brought their first product to market and it appears as
single-handedly revolutionized the storage market: The ioDrive
(already available
here). DV Nation was
the first company to sell nothing but Solid State Drives (SSDs). We have done more
testing than any another establishment and felt compelled to give a
review. The typical SSD is a collection of nand flash chips
(typically from Samsung, but could also be another vendor such as
Hynix) combined with a controller and SATA or IDE interface. An
SSD has no moving parts, no spinning drive heads, emits no noise.
The onboard flash memory is non-volatile, meaning that it retains data
when you power down the computer. While the best hard drives
have an access time (time to find your requested chunk of data) of
about 8 milliseconds (ms), an SSD has an access time of less than 1ms.
Usually less than .2 of a millisecond. An SSD with the popular
SATA connector is limited to SATA's bandwidth of about 300MB/S, and
even fast SSDs currently achieve "only" 120MB/S read and write.
Fusion-IO has developed an SSD uses a PCI-E X4 (PCI Express) connector
as their interface, plugging right into the high-speed heart of any
modern system. This shatters the SATA I/O barrier.
Actually it stomps it into the ground as you will
see. People experienced in the
field of SSD will note that performance of an SSD can vary depending
on the controller you plug it into (such as Intel Matrix, or the
controller found on an nVidia chipset motherboard), but the ioDrive IS
its own controller...and drive, yielding high performance regardless
of the system you plug it into. For more general information on
what an SSD is, see the dropdown box above for
About SSDs,
Benefits of SSDs,
and Uses of SSDs.
Now on with the review. When a company's motto is "The
performance of a SAN in the palm of your hand," expectations are high,
so lets continue...
About Fusion-IO
Fusion-IO was founded in 2006 by a team
experienced in networking and storage. Based in Salt
Lake City, Utah, their mission is to truly break the barriers in
storage technology. There have been news releases, videos posted
online, and appearances at industry trade shows since last year.
The suspense has been building.
IODrive overview
Company
provided specifications (80GB and 160GB)
CAPACITY
80GB & 160GB
SLC or MLC
SLC "single-level cell"
READ SPEED (MB/S)
700
WRITE SPEED (MB/S)
600
IOPS (READ)
107,000 (sustained 4K random reads)
IOPS (WRITE)
96,000 (sustained 4K random writes)
ACCESS TIME (LATENCY)
50 microseconds (order of magnitude
faster than other SSDs)
BUS INTERFACE
PCI-Express X4, low profile card
WEIGHT
<
2 ounces
OPERATING SYSTEM
64-bit Windows (XP-64, Vista-64, Server, etc), LINUX RHEL 4&5: SLES 9
& 10
** No 32-bit Windows support at this time
LIFESPAN (wear leveling)
80GB: 51 years, 160GB: 101 years
(1TB
write/erase per day)
ENVIRONMENTAL
TEMPERATURE
Operating: 0C to 55C
Non-operating -40C to 70C
Min
Nominal
Max
Power (W)
6
-9
3V Input
Voltage (V)
3.0
3.3
3.6
Current (A)
1.5
2.0
Voltage (V)
11.0
12.0
20.0
Current (A)
.5
.9
Temperature
Operational
0
55
Non-Operational
-40
70
Air Flow (LFM)
300
Humidity (%)
5
95
Altitude (ft)
Operational
10,000
Non-Operational
30,000
COMMENTS
Fusion-IO offers the 80GB and 160GB
drives in the chart, but will also come out with 320GB. The
320GB model will be MLC based with similar performance. A
few percentage points slower than the 80GB and 160GB, but still
excellent. Any SSD manufacturer would steer a customer toward
SLC products for servers. MLC has traditionally be slower and
not as long-lasting, so it is interesting to see that Fusion-IO's
technology has overcome this according to their documentation. You are just buying the drive
without worrying about which nand type is involved. More about
SLC vs MLC at our
FAQ
Speaking of lifespan, many people "have
heard that SSDs wear out." This is just not true, and has not
been true for years. Each SSD manufacturer is responsible for
wear leveling in their controller. This spreads out the writes
among the flash chips so that the do not wear out. As you can
see from the table, the ioDrive should last much longer than the
system in which you install it. If the 80GB IODrive does 1
Terabyte of write erase cycles EVERY DAY, it will last 51
years...Surely longer than any mechanical hard drive.
One last note before we
continue, and we will elaborate in the installation section; The
IODrive is NOT CURRENTLY bootable. Fusion-IO will release a
firmware update in Q4 that will allow the ioDrive to be a bootable
device. You can have a small boot drive, even another SSD, and
still get the performance benefit of the ioDrive by installing every
program onto the ioDrive, and using it for your swap file(s).
FURTHER COMMENTS ON USES FOR THE IODRIVE
Fusion-IO is targeting this drive to the server community. It
just happens to be the fastest drive on the planet, regardless of your application.
In the computing world, highest performance filters from servers /
networking and gaming, down into the general computing world. In
the 90s if an enthusiast wanted the fastest storage subsystem, he
could take a cue from the server crowd and by an add-in SCSI card with
SCSI hard drive. Want to burn a CD (back when blank CD-Rs cost $15
EACH), you had to go SCSI. It was a little more expensive, but
it offered top performance. Same with gigabit networking.
Not many consumers availed themselves to it early on. We
recognize the ioDrive to be in the same category. It provides
the performance REQUIRED of servers, but is nice to have at any level.
This
review will focus on the consumer benchmarks that most enthusiasts are
familiar with. Fusion-IO's literature states that their
drive has 1000X the I/O performance, while using only 1% of the power
required by today's other high performance storage solution.
This would seem to imply that the drive could pay for itself just in
power savings. Fusion-IO lists following applications:
TRANSACTION PROCESSING: 100X faster response time
10X the transactions per second
CONTENT CACHING / SERVING: Host and serve 10X the content per server
Terabytes of Virtual Memory with near DRAM speeds
VIRTUALIZATION: Host 4X more virtual machines
Avoid service interrupts due to I/O contention
Save and resume virtual machine states in seconds
MEDIA HANDLING: Serve 10X more streams
No more waiting for loads and saves
Edit multiple high definition streams in real time. While the
company designed this for servers, we will see how it can work for
even the everyday user. Users with multiple open files, or
loading massive game levels, or programs that take a long time to load,
such as Photoshop, should see drastic improvements with this device.
Users could consider this for an always-on, power- efficient, totally
quiet solution in HTPC (Home Theater), home server, etc.
10X the transactions per second