Comments on: Technology Focus: Fusion IO Solid State Flash Memory

By: 3D Studio Max Club - Page 19 - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

3D Studio Max Club - Page 19 - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:27:01 +0000

[...] right up there w/ the cintiq on my "do want – can't afford" list. Really cool hardware. fusion io __________________ [...]

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:44:15 +0000

Thanks for the extra information Leonard and Vincent Brisebois, really helpful. When I can, I will have to invest in one of these! especaily for PS and ZB.

By: Vincent Brisebois

Vincent Brisebois — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:16:36 +0000

Actually the Fusion-io cards do support TRIM and not only in Windows 7, all OS’s because Fusion-io wrote their own driver. Also Fusion-io cards are already running massive online stores and the social networking sites you use every day. Over a regular raid you benefit from low latency (50 microseconds rather than a few milliseconds you get even with SSD). This low latency turns the cards into a sort of extended ram for applications that disk cache like compositing, editing applications and photoshop. It really shouldn’t be seen as storage, it’s a new tier of memory that sits between your hard drive and you RAM that allows you to massively accelerate applications that cache to disk. Also Fusion-io has both SLC and MLC solutions, the SLC solutions are more expensive but do provide more performance and longevity.

By: SSD

SSD — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:18:51 +0000

This is MLC not SLC. No BOOT, No TRIM, No SLC, No way!

By: musta

musta — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:48:25 +0000

It’s too early to adopt an SSD, let alone an SSD based solution like Fusion IO.
There’s no TRIM support for these things yet, so serious performance degradation over time is inevitable.

I’ll wait till the dust settles before buying into any SSD/SSD based solution.

BTW, how many GB of RAM did the test platform on that video have?

By: CGerard

CGerard — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:20:02 +0000

I was checking out the prices on Amazon and it turns out you can get both ioxtremes for $2000.

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:43:47 +0000

Coming from a studio owner, I think it’s still a little too costly. If you want to go raid you will have to spend $2400.
ioextreme pro $1500
ioextreme $900

I can create a nice 5 drive SATA raid (with a larger capacity) for half that amount. Granted it may not be as fast, but your still working against average studio budgets that have to make a compromise.

Hopefully in the future the price will go down.

Frank

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 24 May 2010 01:34:48 +0000

Would this make ZBrush work better?

By: Vincent Brisebois

Vincent Brisebois — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:06:27 +0000

Leonard is correct, they aren’t bootable at this time but I use a 64GB SSD as a boot disk for the OS but install all my applications on the raided ioXtremes. I can launch the entire Adobe Creative Master Suite in under 20 seconds… As for 3D applications, as Leo said the product accelerates read and write which really isn’t a big issue for 3D. Where it will help is when you load and save files or when you use Level Of Detail or plugins to load on demand (load an entire game level or CAD file and have it load the region around your camera as you move through it). It also makes a difference with point cache files, like particle systems, once you cache a mesh you are basically streaming it form the hard drive. Also with 3dsmax 2011 you get Autodesk Composite so you can playback everything you rendered in real-time (you also get Composite with Maya 2010 and 2011). Zbrush and Mudbox benefit greatly with the undo, a lot of heavy zbrush artists use SSD drives so that they can brush, undo, brush, undo… the undo kills you in those apps when you don’t have a fast disk. For Photoshop it’s like having an extra 160GB of ram, when you run out of ram it swaps to the scratch disk so we have seen huge speed increase on large files so anyone doing matte paintings or posters for print benefit from the performance (again this is only if you fill your RAM and need more space). What’s interesting that I didn’t mention in the video is that I only have 6 GB of ram on that system and I do stereoscopic 2K compositing with it, because the two ioXtremes give me an extra 160GB of space that my app uses like RAM.

By: Vortex

Vortex — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:32:09 +0000

Looks awesome. Anyone know what kind of portable case that is, i’d love to have one of those.