Testing and comparing Fusion-io ioScale and ioDrive2 cards

Having received a fairly decent amount of positive responses to the cycle of our articles shedding light on the products of the Fusion-io company, ADVANSERV decided not to stop on the achieved result and continued to follow the same course. We are proud to say that this time we have at our disposal a very difficult, until recently, map from the new ioScale line. What does the manufacturer promise us? - If you describe in a few words, you get a short, but capacious - just as quickly, but for less money! It sounds very tempting. Trust, as they say, but check, we will try to figure it out for yourself!


We decided, for clarity, to attach the results of our past testing of ioDrive2 series cards to new tests, so that you have the opportunity to study and compare the performance of both products.
Before you begin testing the product, let's find out what kind of strange beast in front of us. With this we will be helped by the presentation, exclusively provided to us by the manufacturer, as the official representative of Fusion-io in Russia. So, what is the actual card needed and what does it offer?


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Now let's proceed directly to testing the product. As a test sample, we had an 825Gb ioScale card.
The configuration of our test bench has not changed since last time:

Platform - HP ProLiant DL380 G7
Processor - Xeon E5606
Memory - 8 GB
Hard drives - 2xSAS 146GB 10k

The test suite has also not changed, proving its worth:
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Disk Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark 3
• Fio
• Iometr
• SQLIO

We decided, for clarity, to attach the results of our past testing of ioDrive2 series cards to new tests, so that you have the opportunity to study and compare the performance of both products.

ioDrive2










ioScale










ioDrive2






ioScale






ioDrive2


ioScale


ioDrive2


ioScale


FIO ioDrive3 vs ioScale






If we talk about software, then all the features that were present in the ioDrive2 cards are saved and in ioScale , we have already discussed this in more detail in our previous article.
Conducting tests and analyzing the data, we were alarmed by the unusually low performance, which gave ioDrive2 . Having a little thought about the possible reasons, by common efforts we came to the conclusion that the problem probably lies in the firmware installed on ioDrive2. We put the latest version of the driver and see:

Testing was carried out with the parameters:
Total Length = 256 Mb
Queue Depth = 2-10

ATTO Disk Benchmark
ioDrive2










ioDrive2
AS SSD Benchmark IOPS

AS SSD Benchmark MB / S

AS SSD Copy-Benchmark


ioScale




Crystaldiskmark

ioDrive2


ioScale


ioDrive2

ioScale


FIO ioDrive2 vs ioScale
ioDrive2 with old firmware and driver





This is a comparison with the new firmware and driver.



SQLIO


SQLIO Random Writes Test


SQLIO Sequential Reads Test


SQLIO Sequential Writes Test


These results are more similar to the truth, which once again reminds us of the importance of keeping track of the updates coming out!
We can say with confidence that we were pleasantly surprised by the test results. The ioScale speed approaches ioDrive2 , and sometimes it catches up with confidence, all at a much lower cost of the product!
By the way, about the cost - the price order starts with a mark of 100k rubles for a 410Gb card, which is comparable to the price tags of the closest competitors. However, for example, a similarly priced OCZ card has a volume of only 300Gb and is significantly inferior to ioScale in speed.
Among the many advantages, there must always be a flaw, and it really is. These wonderful cards are available for purchase in Russia only when ordering in quantities of 10 or more. But we did something to level this flaw!
Possessing the rights of the official partner of Fusion-io in Russia, the company ADVANSERV , was able to order this product in a smaller volume, thereby making it more accessible to buyers in our country. We are glad that we managed to find a compromise by the manufacturer, and we will be happy to recommend this product to our customers.
I want to remind you that you can take this card with us to Demo for testing , or we can provide a remote server configured for your needs and with a card installed on it. For all questions on Fusion-io, please contact our head of the direction Alexey Kotov .

Korp author