Conclusion
Fusion-io’s latest product, the ioXtreme family, brings down the price point for professional-grade, PCI Express-based flash SSDs to well below $1,000. ioXtreme offers an 80GB capacity today, which you can magnify by aggregating several ioXtreme drives into your system. You’ll need the more expensive Pro versions to take advantage of this feature, though.
The ioXtreme is not bootable, which means you cannot run your operating system off it. Instead, it’s designed as an application drive or, more precisely, as an application accelerator. Everything that you can run off the ioXtreme will receive a massive performance boost, which is comparable to what you can get by installing more RAM. Possible applications for the ioXtreme are Windows swap file offloading, databases, virtualized system partitions, running temporary files for Adobe Photoshop, or providing additional memory space to applications. At 80GB, we’re talking about memory that would be unaffordable if installed through conventional RAM.
The new ioXtremes are clearly faster than Intel’s X25-M G2 drives without providing higher capacity. ioXtreme delivers up to twice the I/O performance, much better maximum throughput, lower minimum read throughput, and write performance levels that are markedly superior to Intel’s drive. We would have loved to use an X25-E for direct comparison, but it wasn’t available to us at the time we did this review. Fusion-io also introduces performance optimizing modes, which help to maintain high write performance at the expense of capacity.
After all the comparison with Intel’s X25 drive, it has to be said that the ioXtreme wasn’t designed to replace these products. Ideally, the two would work together in a system running off an X25-M G2 but utilizing the ioXtreme to offload application data and the Windows swap file. If you’re configuring a high-end PC with an Extreme Edition processor, multi-GPU graphics, lots of RAM, and an SSD, the ioXtreme is attractive—as long as you run professional applications that can actually take advantage of it.
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Wow these things are fast.
But not bootable? That's a shame.
how would these be for a gaming rig?
how would these be for a gaming rig?
well seeing that Fatality is a partner in this i would imagine it would be pretty good for a gaming rig. my bad
It's a shame an article on professional storage does not include benchmarks on compilation times - a definitely professional application of storage. I've asked THG staff on numerous occasions to include a C++ compilation benchmark, but to no avail... It was only offered once in the past 6 years. Please, add such a benchmark so software developers like myself can make sense of your articles too!
Ouch, almost 1,000 dollars. I would go for the Kingston SSD Boot Drive for under $100 on newegg.
just a nitpick here, but you listed the charts with the unit ms, which is milliseconds... if you want to do microseconds you need to use µs.
Still not overwhelming for the price difference. Sure the headline max STR look great compared to Intel but when the going gets tough the Intel can still keep up. Waiting for better chipsets (wider slots and larger bandwidth to CPU) and PCI-E v2. What size Intel SSD did you use? What were the prices again ?
They have now replaced the original ioDrive's.
$6000, $2600, $900, $300 (ioDrive Duo 160GB, ioDrive 80GB, ioXtreme 80GB, Intel 80GB).
RAID0 of 2x160GB or 3x80GB Intel SSD for proce of ioXtreme.
What about the others like OCZ Z-drive and PhotoFast ?
Too bad no TRIM here...
To add to john_dune's comment, the graph's x-axis states the unit is "ns" which is nanoseconds. You guys managed to use milli, micro and nano all for one graph/paragraph about the same data
how would these be for a gaming rig?
Increased minimum frame rate, and faster loading times. Nothing a common SSD can't also do to the same effect.
No boot, No trim, limited feature set, super limited capacity, super high price = FAIL for 9/10 users in the market.
Regardless of how fast these are(and yes they are fast enough to use as RAM replacement) they are just to high of a cost per GB when the majority of SSD vendors are offering >= $3gb.
In addition to john_dune's and randumbzor's comment. "µs" microseconds (1 millionth of a second) and "ns" nanoseconds (1 billionth of a second), are not the same thing. In the future, please try to "error" proof your articles; otherwise they loose their validity. XD
Hmm. How fast would a system be if the bootable drive was the Intel x25 and this as the application? Would Windows running on the x25 and applications running off the ioX be the fastest possible setup for any system? would like to see the tests on that.
Don't be hatin' (l)user-one. I've met and played with/against fatality before. He's a nice guy and a talented player. Back on track...this is a good idea but at the price and storage size, it fails when there are other alternatives out there (re: X25-E).
bout as fast as your mother was last night!
Wouldn't just running programs from a RAMdisk be cheaper and faster?
We tested these at work last year, and while they are screaming fast, they were too expensive for the capacity they offered. We are now testing our computing clusters using Intel Enterprise editions SSD gen2 units with 4 drives configured in 2 raid0 arrays.. While the performence isnt comparable to the ioExtreme hardware, we can equip 400 node clusters with the intel drives for the same price as a few of the ioExtremes.. No brainer..
how would these be for a gaming rig?
Swap For games while running fraps like GTA IV or crysis with less of a hit.
*reads* "Amazon sells the 80GB base model for $895." *clicks to next article*