Fusion-io drives reviewed by TechEye
Fusion-io solid state drive has a whole lot to give
30 August 2010 Source: www.techeye.net
The uptake of specialist solid state storage has been phenomenal and like all high-end peripherals, end users are constantly looking to enhance their systems to be more robust and; within mission critical systems absolutely robust. With the marketplace embracing this technology, there is now a growing trend by many end users to use the kind of drives made by Fusion-io.
A typical SSD consists of a collection of NAND flash chips combined with a controller and SATA interface. The lack of moving parts has meant that typical access times are a fraction of those obtained from traditional spindle-based hard drives. However, SSDs are still limited to SATA's bandwidth of 300MB/s, and dependent on the drive controller built in to the motherboard.
Enter today's exceptional piece of equipment from the specialist SSD manufacturers Fusion-io. Instead of taking the traditional SATA route, Fusion-io have developed an SSD that uses a PCI Express connector as their interface - allowing them to be their own controller and plug into the heart of the system.
In our opinion these drives from Fusion-io and their successors are the future within the Workstation place and in mission critical applications and final render outputs...
...Fusion-io from its foundation four years ago has gone from strength to strength and almost all the first tier companies as well as the second tiers have embraced and adopted the technology. Downtime to disk failure, disk fragmentation and free space problems are now a thing of the past...
...The adoption path tests we have shown on how fast the drive can be are just the tip of the iceberg, but they also show without unequivocal doubt their reliability and stability while under load...
...We've never seen better benchmarks for a drive from PCMark 2005 and PCMark...
...Gaming studios would be wise to look carefully at these results. The usage of this important piece of kit can and will be used in many important phases of production. Remember this is a PCI Express X4/X8 card that can be readily switched quickly between systems...
...For those after a workstation packing high speed productivity, reliability and stability, look no further...
...Ultimately, the clever boffins at Fusion-io have taken us aback at their product's complete adaptability...
...If you fear a dropped drive or raid controller going down in your raid arrays - think Fusion-io. If you fear severe disk fragmentation downtime - think Fusion-io.
View the Fusion-io range