Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD Review
The Setup, Methodology and SANDRA
Also, you'll note that we performed all of our individual and RAID SSD testing on an Intel X58 chipset-based motherboard via its ICH10R Southbridge SATA controller. The OCZ Z-Drive and ioXtreme PCI Express cards were tested in PCIe X16 slots on the same test bed. For a few of our file transfer tests specifically, we utilized Fusion-io's ioDrive as a source drive to read files from, for our write performance testing, or write files to, for our read performance testing of all products we show in the following performance comparisons.
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In our SiSoft SANDRA testing, we used the Physical Disk test suite. We ran the tests without formatting the drives and both read and write performance metrics are detailed below. Please forgive the use of these screen captures and thumbnails, which will require a few more clicks on your part. However, we felt it was important to show you the graph lines in each of the SANDRA test runs, so you are able to see how the drives perform over time and memory location and not just an average rated result.
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;) Fusion-io ioXtreme
Write Performance |
;) 2 x Intel X25-M 80GB SSD RAID 0 Write Performance |
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We've posted 2 x Intel X25-M (Gen 1 80GB) RAID 0 160GB scores for a quick comparison to the ioXtreme's performance. This RAID array offered in excess of 500MB/sec read bandwidth and 160MB/sec+ of write bandwidth. The ioXtreme shows a flat, very robust performance graph here with read throughput in excess of 800MB/sec. On the write side of the equation, the ioXtreme shoes some oscillation but not much, at 286MB/sec or so.
;) Fusion-io ioXtreme Pro
Read Performance |
;) Fusion-io ioXtreme Pro Write Performance |
The ioXtreme Pro offers, as expected, nearly identical performance to the standard ioXtreme product. You'll recall earlier that we noted both ioXtreme variants offer identical performance, with the only difference between the two cards being that Pro cards are able to pair with another ioXtreme Pro or standard card, for RAID array configurations like RAID 0 for even higher performance. Unfortunately, SANDRA's test suite did not work properly with a RAID 0 setup with the ioXtremes, since they need to be configured with Windows software RAID and SANDRA saw the disks as two separate drives rather than a single volume. We were able to run other benchmarks with the ioXtremes in RAID 0 for a few other tests however and we'll show you some of the results next.
