Sunday, July 25, 2010

Fusion IO vs. OCZ Z-Drive R2

I've finally finished testing the FusionIO IODrive in 320GB and the OCZ Z-Drive P88 R2 in 1TB.
The spreadsheets with the performance metrics for both SSD's are here:http://public.me.com/ndlucas

They are both good performers in IOP/s with the Fusion IO edging out the OCZ on the smaller IO sizes.

OCZ IOPS

























FusionIO IOPS



























Raw performance showed the OCZ was the clear winner.

OCZ RAW Performance


























Fusion IO RAW Performance


























With that out of the way, the question is now, which one makes more sense for your application and budget?

The 320GB FusionIO is priced in the $7000 range.
The 1TB OCZ Z-Drive R2 is in the $4600 range.

I have a feeling that FusionIO has enterprise support standing by, where OCZ does not. Maybe I am wrong, but that is the impression I get. For my purposes I will get an extra Z-Drive for a cold-spare while waiting for OCZ to turn around a replacement in the event of a failure.


-Noel

8 comments:

  1. Which fusion IO part are you comparing? Is it IOdrive or IOdrive duo?

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  2. I don't think it is a fair comparison .. IODrive is just 1 SSD. OCZ Z-Drive P88 R2 in 1TB is 4x250GB SSDs. It is like 4 against 1.

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  3. Prashanth,

    I know what you mean. I don't classify the OCZ the same as I do the Fusion-io ioDrive. See my other post regarding the failure I experienced with the Z-Drive. Also, this clarifies my comparison of the two a bit more: http://itopsmgr.blogspot.com/2011/01/fusion-io-vs-ocz.html

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  4. The application I want to use either board for is going to use it as a cache resource for spinning disk - as to reliability - since it's going to be mirrored over InfiniBand, I think the sheer price advantage of the 1TB OCZ over the duo's capacity could be a big plus for my purposes. Thoughts?

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  5. Joel,

    You could try it and you might just come out fine with it, but I simply cannot tolerate 2+weeks of time to get a single card replaced. I could understand a couple to a few days though. I am even more leery of any OCZ products with the recent shenanigans they've pulled lately: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2143367

    I simply think marketing a product as "Enterprise Ready" means good support & timely warranty replacements. I have found neither with my experiences with them. Maybe one day they'll revamp their support & warranty areas and then they could have a competitive enterprise-class product. At this point, I would not take a truckload of them for free because of the headaches I've had. My enterprise data is worth far more than just a few thousand dollars saved.

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  6. That's good to know, that the support is bad. That is the kiss of death. Even though we stock spares for our customers of our various technology components, we like to leverage technology that will be supported by the manufacturer if issues come up. I think we'll stick with the Fusion I/O product, hear nothing but good things from them, and we've been using Texas Memory Systems and found them to be excellent.

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  7. Yep, Fusion-io is the way to go if you want support and a company that stands behind their product to go with the performance. In the clustered storage world, TMS is the King for sure. TMS is hard to beat for high performance clustered storage. SQL Server clusters and Oracle RAC love it.

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