Solid State Drives is starting to get some quite impressive specifications also when considering transfer rates, which has been a bit of an Achilles heal in the past. Even if the memory circuits are constantly being improved there is a limitation with regular consumer Solid State Drives. The SATA 3Gbps interface is userfriendly and allows for transfer rates up to 300MB/s but the fastest SSDs are already starting to near these speeds and if you’re using large clusters of NAND flash circuits it becomes quite easy to reach the limits of the SATAII interface. This is precisely what Fusion-io has done and therefore decided to use PCI Express instead.
We have reported on Fusion-io ioDrive before and this PCIe-based SSD has some monstrous specifications. The write speed is said to be around 550MB/s while the read speed is said to weigh in at 700MB/s. At TweakTown they have published one of the first detailed reviews of Fusion-io ioDrive and when a seemingly simple add-in card offers the same performance as eight 15,000 RPM SCSI drives in RAID 0 we have to say that technology has potential.
In many tests, such as access time and parallel load the mechanical cluster is completely. For performance oriented servers and workstations ioDrive looks like Superman. However in terms of raw storage it is not quite as efficient. Fusion-io’s 80GB models costs around $3,000. If you want to go big with the 320GB model will you have to empty the entire account and hand over $14,400.
The entire review of Fusion-io ioDrive can be found at TweakTown.
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