Fusion-io ioDrive - PCIe Solid State Drive benched

TweakTown had the opportunity to test the Fusion-io ioDrive, this is a PCIe solid state disk that promises much higher performance than traditional SSDs.

Fusion-io calls their card based solid-state storage technology ioMemory. It is a catchy name that goes along with the products name, ioDrive. The ioDrive uses NAND flash memory, just like the solid-state drives we have been reviewing for the last year. The difference is that everything we have looked at so far connects to a SATA port and the ioDrive rides the fast lane, 10GB/s to be exact from a 4-lane PCIe slot. If you think it sounds fast, just hang tight, there is a lot to cover before we get to the benchmarks.

Normally products like the Fusion-io ioDrive are not reviewed on general purpose computing review sites like TweakTown. In 2009 we will start to cover more products in the enterprise market and run them in parallel with our usual content. Behind the scenes the US office has been covering enterprise storage products for many years, but most of this testing has been for private reports and for our own twisted amusement.

Read more over here. The ioDrive is designed for enterprises and costs a whopping $2,995 but performs really well, TweakTown says it outperforms the best enterprise 15,000 RPM drive in an 8 drive RAID configuration while consuming a lot less power.