News - Fusion-io ioDrive Duo shatters SSD speeds: 1.5GB/s read

[HEXUS]

Super-fast PCIe-based SSD drive to be launched in April.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

wow thats a big cost! Guess most people will be sticking with traditional drives and SSDs then.

[Tattysnuc]

I'm not sure that you'd be able to use these via a raid controller. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but surely yu'd have to interface via the southbridge of an add in card to Raid these. These interface via the PCI express interface, not SATA or EDIE so I don't see how that would be possible...

Also, I don't thing that you'd be able to boot from these devices. Limited use if that is the case. F*in g quick but somewhat constrained on size to small to medium databases, with no obvious backup mechanism.

[Tidus]

Impressive until you see the price. I wonder what market these drives are aimed at.

[TheAnimus]

I thought you RAIDed them directly with the hardware onboard via a bridge connector, but i could be wrong?

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to boot from them, assuming they have a controller BIOS, after all surely its just off the shelf components pre-assembled and tweaked?

I think the use for these will be at first, databases which are so worried about latency they don't want to use an SS SAN, there have been oodles of these about based on battery backed up RAM.

[Biscuit]

yeah i have seen the battery ones, gigabyte did one didnt they?

I could really have done with just a small 5-10GB one to use as a scratch disk as its often the hard drive which is holding back my rendering.

[jim]

The IO performance on these drives is mindboggling, wipes the floor up with the X25-E which is hardly slow to start with.

Nonetheless, I doubt they'll ever see the light of day outside of servers, certainly not until they are bootable anyway.

[chrestomanci]

yeah i have seen the battery ones, gigabyte did one didnt they?

I could really have done with just a small 5-10GB one to use as a scratch disk as its often the hard drive which is holding back my rendering.

If you just want the extra space as a strictly temporary scratch disc, then why not just buy more RAM. These days 8G of DDR2 will cost less than £100.

Once you have stuffed the extra RAM in you workstation, then under Linux is is easy to configure a RAM backed disc. Just add the following to your /etc/fstab

none                    /tmp   tmpfs  size=16G         0 0

You can adjust the mount point and capacity to suit your needs, the above line was taken from my system config.

You can do something similar under Solaris, thought I don't know the syntax of the top of my head. I am not sure about windows, hopefully there is a way.

The scratch space will only use up as much memory as is needed for files, it will not reserve the full 16G on startup like old style RAM discs used to. So long as you also configure at lest the same amount of swap, then you don't have to worry about scratch files filling up your RAM, as they will be candidates for swapping out just like anything else in memory. I have 24 G of swap configured so even if the temp partion above got completely filled, it could all be swapped out and still leave 8G for programs and other data.

The main downside is that the data will get lost each time you reboot, so you had better only use it for temporary data.

[crossy]

You can do something similar under Solaris, thought I don't know the syntax of the top of my head.

/tmp on Solaris is a memory-based filesystem - in fact it's tmpfs like on Linux

There's plenty of info out there on Solaris' use of /tmp, but here's a nice concise one http://wikis.sun.com/display/BigAdmi...the+Solaris+OS

Windows seems to be a mixed bag although most folks seem to reckon this article (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/0...d-2003-server/). But I don't use this myself - Solaris and Linux are what I use for the heavy duty work, Windows is for gaming.

Hope this helps, Bob.

[TheAnimus]

RAM mounted storage is *nothing* like an enterprise SSD set up. Most of those way in at TB ranges, and persist data between re-boots, by having battery back up (okay so they also often take up like 4U+!).

something like this is very exciting because it will loose even less data in the case of a power outage!

[Biscuit]

If you just want the extra space as a strictly temporary scratch disc, then why not just buy more RAM. These days 8G of DDR2 will cost less than £100.

Once you have stuffed the extra RAM in you workstation, then under Linux is is easy to configure a RAM backed disc. Just add the following to your /etc/fstab

none                    /tmp   tmpfs  size=16G         0 0

You can adjust the mount point and capacity to suit your needs, the above line was taken from my system config.

You can do something similar under Solaris, thought I don't know the syntax of the top of my head. I am not sure about windows, hopefully there is a way.

The scratch space will only use up as much memory as is needed for files, it will not reserve the full 16G on startup like old style RAM discs used to. So long as you also configure at lest the same amount of swap, then you don't have to worry about scratch files filling up your RAM, as they will be candidates for swapping out just like anything else in memory. I have 24 G of swap configured so even if the temp partion above got completely filled, it could all be swapped out and still leave 8G for programs and other data.

The main downside is that the data will get lost each time you reboot, so you had better only use it for temporary data.

Thats handy to know but how would you go about it in windows/mac as its often after effects, shake etc which i use.

[crossy]

Thats handy to know but how would you go about it in windows/mac as its often after effects, shake etc which i use.

Windows I already covered in my first post - (I hope - haven't had any time to check this).

Mac (OS X) isn't something I've had a chance to play around with (and there's no way I'm paying Apple's daft prices for hardware to find out*). But I did find a good few articles on the interweb thingy that talk about it, e.g. http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/23/creat...k-in-mac-os-x/

(* although if I thought it'd run okay on my VMware Server [on Linux], then I'd probably pony out for a copy of OS X - looks fascinating )

HTH, Bob.

[TooNice]

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to boot from them, assuming they have a controller BIOS, after all surely its just off the shelf components pre-assembled and tweaked?

Unless they've finally worked out a solution for it, the original ioDrive is not bootable. It's probably possible but perhaps it's not as straightforward as it seems?

[Georgy291]

has anyone forgot to mention that SSDs are a form off eprom memmory and they can only support 100,000 read/write operations so its not going to make a very good hard drive

[TheAnimus]

No they have life span infomation on their spec sheets.

Remeber mechanical drives have a nasty habbit of dieing, so manafacturers quote approximate MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures).

Now fusionIO think that under their usage patterns, the drive will die in 24 years? Good enough?

[Georgy291]

you would be amazed? that eprom has this limitation, i know this because my dad is a electronic engeneer and he needed to use a flash memory to record something over 20 years and thats why all flash memory wont do.

SSDS are no diffrent