Drive at maniacal speeds
THOSE OF YOU who dream of lightning fast data storage and disk access can prepare to have your dreams come to life: the Fusion IODrive has hit the testbench of the Internet, and it's a firecracker.
Appearing on techno-temple TweakTown, the drive is actually not a drive. It's a PCI Express card with 80GB to 320GB worth of Samsung NAND Flash.
Now this isn't your standard SSD, the kind becoming popular in notebooks these days. Oh no - those are designed to be connected to the SATA controller, which runs at around 3GB/s tops. By connecting directly to the PCI-Express bus, the IODrive can achieve a full 10GB/s. That's more than three times the SATA transfer speed, for the mathematically challenged.
The boys at TweakTown reckon that it's the fastest storage option they've ever seen, thanks to its "near nonexistent latency", and suggest that the drive "Raises the bar so high that once adopted, traditional solutions will be considered legacy products".
Nice.
Of course, legacy data storage products are a great deal cheaper than this bad boy. The 80GB version clocks in at a whopping $3,000, and the tradtional disk sized 320GB model will set you back a credit-crunching $14,000.
But given how cheap PCs are these days, why not splash out on some fast storage to make up the numbers? µ
L'Inq
TweakTown
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$14000??? thank you, but I'll rather raid a few of Intel SSD's.
You get this wonderful speeds with a brand new EMPTY drive. Once you fill that drive up to partial capacity the performance falls WAY off - by an order of 50X.
It has to do with on an empty drive every write regardless of size is just a flash write to empty flash cell(s) *but* on a partially full drive the controller has to do housekeeping - read a cell, erase that cell, write new modified contents - and the erase is the time killer.
So no revolution here.....
No one needs speed so badly that they would pay $14000 for 320Gbytes.
Just a hunch but something tells me this won't be a top seller.
Well there where those massive 50 mb copper plates for mere $50,000.00 & they Sold. Yet, with Deep Throat Back In Chicago, Ultee' Needs every Drop of Speed To View & Review my ex partes' commentos. Faster than Ultee', Perfect for SuperComputing on Desktop & Workstation Miracle. What Next, Fios Memory? Soil Loom Memory, Get Twig for Result or High Fiber weaving, its all Memory loom & Location Game, Give Er Day & it'll Spot 10 Gb/s Libary.TS Drashek
Why is it that people are always quoting
the interface's theoretical max throughput?
Is the storage device actually capable
of a sustained 10 gigabytes/sec ???
I know sata drives always advertise that
they're "SATA 2 3gbit/sec!! Oooo-Ahhhhh!
I've yet to see a single drive produced that could fully saturate a 3gbit sata interface. Maybe if someone would get off their duff and make some 20k rpm sata drives.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm,......20k rpm
(sound of Homer drooling)
I saw the charts for R/W access times and laughed out loud.
I think your off on some of your figures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express
PCIe x16 bandwidth is 4 GB/S; PCIe x16 V2 bandwidth is 8 GB/S. What you referred to in the article is the transfer rate which is the data payload plus control data. That is 10 Giga Transfers per sec, 10 GB/S counting the 2 control bits for every 8 bits of data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata#Throughput
Also you mentioned that the throughput of the PCIe interface was 'over three times that of SATA'. While its accurate that it is over 3 times faster, thats not the most precise comparison.
I believe that you were thinking the data throughput rate of "SATA 3Gbs" (which is the official name, not "SATA 2" as some call it) was 3 GigaBytes per sec. The transfer rate (with control data) is 3 Gigabits per second or 375 Mega Transfers per sec, with a data throughput rate of 2.4 Gb/S or 300 MB/S.
So a more precise way of describing it is that PCIe x16 V2 has a 26 2/3 times higher data throughput than SATA 3.0Gbs (8GB/S / 300MB/S).
Now this comparison also assumes that we are talking Base 10 Mega and Giga and not Base 2 Mebi and Gibi.
"That's more than three times the SATA transfer speed, for the mathematically challenged."
I thought this line was rather ironic. Almost like the blind leading the blind here at the INQ. LOL
Scott
Max write speed - 550 MB/Sec - not even close to 10 GB/Sec. Even the max spec of a 4x PCIe card is only 1GB/Sec (this is a 4x card). We expect more from an article!