ioDrive Duo: Meet the Worlds Fastest SSD
Last year, the computer industry saw solid state hard drives (SSDs) come into the mainstream. Since that point, the read and write speeds of such drives has been a hotly contested issue, with companies like Intel, OCZ, and A-Data constantly vying for the title of "world's fastest SSD."
Enter Fusion-io. The company's 80 GB ioDrive is able to produce read and write speeds of 700 MB/sec. and 550 MB/sec., respectively (our review confirms this level of performance). Those speeds combined with the ioDrive's ability to reach 102,000 read IOPS and 92,000 write IOPS (In/Out Operations per Second) meant the ioDrive was the fastest solid state drive available...until now.
Fusion-io today announced its newest storage solution: the ioDrive Duo. The Duo picks up where its older brother left off, bringing unprecedented read and write speed with it. According to Fusion-io, the ioDrive Duo can read and write at 1.5 GB/sec. and 1.4 GB/sec., giving it over twice the performance of its predecessor. The Duo can also reach 186,000 read IOPS and 167,000 write IOPS.
“Many database and system administrators are finding that SANs [Storage Area Networks] are too expensive and don’t meet performance, protection and capacity utilization expectations,” said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. “This is why more and more application vendors are moving toward application-centric solid-state storage. The ioDrive Duo offers the enterprise the advantages of application-centric storage without application-specific programming.”
The ioDrive Duo will be available next month three initiial sizes: 160 GB, 320 GB, and 640 GB. Sometime in the second half of 2009, a 1.28 TB version will be released, making the ioDrive Duo the fastest as well as one of the largest solid state-based storage solutions available.
Unfortunately, the ioDrive Duo does come with some asterisks. It cannot be used as a boot drive, and due to its drivers also requires the use of a 64-bit operating system. While the price is TBA, the original 80 GB ioDrive is still over $3,000, meaning the 160 GB ioDrive Duo will be at least that expensive, with the 1.28 TB version probably going for five figures. Whether you plan to spring for one or not, the ioDrive Duo has certainly set a new standard for SSD speed on a myriad of levels. With Steve Wozniak now on the Fusion-io payroll, who knows what the company will think of next.

Because the major BIOS vendors don't support booting from a pci-e device?
That's why bootable add-in cards carry an onboard boot ROM usually.
In their review of the first IoDrive, Tom's stated that the IoDrive does NOT present a standard I/O interface, meaning the BIOS doesn't recognize it as a bootable device. This is probably by design, why would you need to boot from the IoDrive? This device is designed (by cost alone) to only be used in Database or datacenter applications. Those machines probably never reboot (barring hardware upgrades). Therefore, why add more complexity to something already expensive and complex? Who cares if your fileserver takes a few extra seconds to boot when it has up-time in the thousands of hours? This is purely a storage device. Next you'll be wondering why you could never boot from your old tape-based DLT drive.
SSD are improving very fast, I say we should support it by buying only SSDs even though it's cheaper to get a HDD.
An Intel X25-M for $200 would do it.
We really need to have a small disk array of these things which can be shared to 2 or more servers. The big storage vendors are already in the process of doing this at the high end but it seems like this is an opportunity for the little guys to compete with the EMCs of the world in providing very high IOPS storage subsystems for a fraction of the cost / IOP.
Yeah, because booting from a FusionIO card and a tape drive is a logical comparison. That argument started out descent until that last sentence.
Also, I think FusionIO could rake in some major cash by licensing their tech to motherboard manufacturers as an add-in motherboard card. I would like to see drives plug directly into motherboards just like SO-DIMMs go into laptops. It would clean up the case and allow for up to PCIs x16 lanes to the SSD.
I think an interesting offshoot of this is going to be that now, Gigabit Ethernet has become the bottleneck in General PC usage. I am used to moving large files around and in the past it could be said that the write speed of the drive was a limiting factor, soon we'll have an excuse to Demand 10Gbit Ethernet come on the motherboards.
I guess after that a 1GiG Verizon FiOS link will be the slowdown. Drives like this are also going to bring hardware costs and power bills down for companies, freeing up funds for workers and new projects. It will also mean a lower entry cost for startup ideas that have high hardware requirements.
It's win/win. Combine that with the new LiON batteries they say charge in 30 seconds and weigh less than half of a current battery, and I'll call it a good year.
Errr...actually, no IT manager in their right mind would ever use a nonhot-swappable storage device in any mission critical server. They especially would never use any storage device that would require a total system shutdown to replace. There are many other reasons but I'll only state the obvious.
My guess is that this is more for the enthusiast that wouldn't necessarily have a need to swap out their drive w/o shutting down their system.
(Wish there was an "edit comment" function...)