Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD Review


ATTO Benchmark

ATTO is a more straight-forward type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length.  It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart.  We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes over a total max volume length of 256MB.  This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with default NTFS partitions in Windows Vista 64-bit with SP2.  We've also provided test results from an Intel single and RAID 0 SSD setup as well as OCZ's Z-Drive, for reference.

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark Benchmarks
Synthetic Small and Large File Transfer Tests

 

OCZ Z-Drive m84 256GB

  

Intel X25-M x 2 RAID 0 160GB


ioXtreme 80GB

 
ioXtreme Pro 80GB


The ioXtremes show solid small file transfer performance, all the way down to even 2KB and the cards are as fast as the Intel RAID 0 setup at this level.  With larger transfer sizes, the ioXtreme drives show clearly the fastest read performance from any SSD solution on the market today, with respectable write performance, at 300MB/sec or so.  Though the OCZ Z-Drive also began to stretch its legs with writes in this test showing 2X the performance of the ioXtreme in some cases.

What, no RAID benchmarks again?
That's correct, unfortunately ATTO is unable to accurately measure performance in this test, above the 999MB/sec mark.  With some help from Fusion-io and Windows Perfmon utility, we determined that ATTO was actually wrapping performance readings back around, for transfer rates hitting 1GB/sec and higher.  In fact the ioXtreme RAID 0 pair chalked up what looked like 300MB/sec in some of the larger file transfers of the test, but in reality was pushing 1.3GB/sec (or 1300MB/sec) though the bar graphs and numbers were only showing the 300MB/sec or so, for read throughput.  For write performance, we did observe in excess of 600MB/sec of available throughput in RAID 0 mode with a pair of ioXtreme drives.

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