I was advised that new drivers and new firmware for FusionIO cards improve performance and stability and it is recommended to review results I’ve got about year ago.
Using the same methodology and the same box as for Intel 320 SSD, I run random writes benchmarks for FusionIO 320GB MLC card (I do not have the card I had year ago on hands).
Information about system, FusionIO drives are raw results are on Benchmarks Launchad
First graph is to show timeline for different filesizes. Benchmark starts just after formatting card and filesystem and runs around 1 hour with measuring throughput each 10 sec.
Interesting to see the same pattern as for Intel 320 SSD: the throughput starts at max, then drops down and after some peak stabilizes.
1500 sec seems enough to get stable line for all filesizes. If we take slice of data after 1500 sec and build summary space->throughput graph, it looks like:
So we still have decent declining line. The throughput drops from 500MiB/sec at peak to 110-120MiB/sec at full capacity.
And to have some fun with R/ggplot2 graphs, let’s build graph to compare FusionIO and Intel 320 SSD (with results from previous post)
thx for benchmarks, now I see why those cards are so expensive
This benchmark is all about sustained erase/gc rate since flash has to be erased before it is rewritten. Not having tabular data I calculate about 1.25MB/s/gig for this card. If there is a proper name for this spec, I don’t know it, so let’s call it “Free Space Erase Factor” for now. That is for every extra gig of unused space on the card you get an additional 1.25MB/s of write performance due to the likelihood that the unused space can continue to be erased in parallel. I suspect this rate is mostly dependent on the number of flash memory IC’s on the card. If the fusion-io 640GB uses the same capacity flash chips (just 2x the number) I would suspect it to have higher and more level performance as it fills up since it might theoretically have 2.5MB/s/gig erase factor.
John,
Thanks for analysis.
You can use raw numbers from http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~vadim-tk/percona-benchmark-result/FusionIO-320GB-MLC/files/head:/space-write-performance/