SSD (RAID) drives on PCIe

[[bo]]

SSD (RAID) drives on PCIe

by [bo] » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:31 am

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/16/super-talents-2tb-raiddrive-shipping-next-month-to-the-rich-and/
- 1TB for 5000 USD.
- 1.4GB/s read
- 1.2 GB/s write

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/oczs-pcie-ssd-z-drive-finally-starts-shipping/
- 1TB for 3000 USD.
- 800MB/s read
- 750MB/s write

Nice speed for an even better (worse?) price

[fma38]

by fma38 » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:35 am

Nice! They don't make smaller drives (say 50GB), for a smaller price?

BTW, what is the classical memory (DDR2) speed transfert?

Do you know similar SSD-based raid device on pATA or sATA bus, without the need for a spcific controller?

I'm not looking for speed, here, but just for SSD-based raid in one box.

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:56 am

The SATA bus is way, way slower than PCIe! Check this out:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=645

Even the newest 6Gb/s SATA standard is "slow", that's why those guys above are using the proper bus (PCIe). For comparison, a standard DDR3/1333 chip should have throughput of over 10GB/s. And a PCIe v2 should rate at 8GB/s.

Also, making smaller drives is not economically feasible - the controller costs almost as much as the "storage space".

Regarding SATA and RAIDs without a controller - even a single Intel X25-M G2 can nearly saturate the SATA 3Gb/s bus, so you'd want a PCIe controller if you're doing a RAID. And a 160GB X25-M is 600 USD, so there you go

Still, probably the fastest, cheapest, most accessible variant is 2x80GB X25-M in RAID0 with the on-board RAID that all MBs have nowadays. You'll get 160GB of temp space for Smartblend Or, as I would do this holiday season, use a single X25-M for the system drive, os swap, etc and just wait for MagicBlend 1.0

[AlexandreJ]

by AlexandreJ » Wed Sep 23, 2009 4:31 pm

We're trying to get the supertalend ssd for rendering paris 20 giga project ...

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:01 pm

Whoa... nice! You're trying to buy it or get it as a sponsorship/advertising deal? No need to answer if not appropriate. Post some benchmarks if you get your hands on one of those.

[Castillonis]

by Castillonis » Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:01 pm

If you are going to spend this amount of money you would probably be much better off if you buy a small fibre channel disk array with a RAID controller. You can use 15K or 10K RPM drives and RAID 0. I will ask my friend where I worked on clustered file systems with fibre channel arrays for a solution that is a less expensive and works well. Having actual experience with the different vendors is important as some products to not deliver what the company promises. I can put you in touch with somebody who might recommend which type of hardware to explore as they have much experience. This is an engineer and not a sales person.

Be carefull about using RAID that is actually software RAID. A hardware RAID controller with dedicated on board RAM performs much better.

Last edited by Castillonis on Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[AlexandreJ]

by AlexandreJ » Wed Sep 23, 2009 8:17 pm

I have some experience with hardware raid already, but the best you can expect is around 300, 400 MB/s ( but perhaps I'm wrong ). With SSD we are talking of 1200, 1400 MB/s.

[marco-pano]

by marco-pano » Wed Sep 23, 2009 8:32 pm

Be carefull about using RAID that is actually software RAID. A hardware RAID controller with dedicated on board RAM performs much better.

All I have read confirm your information : software RAID gives a little impovment, only on board RAID controler can be efficient.

[fma38]

by fma38 » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:11 pm

I confirm too: I use 2 partitions in soft (linux kernel) raid 0, and I only have a speed gain of 20%...

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Thu Sep 24, 2009 8:45 am

Castillonis, no RAID in this price segment will beat 1.2GB READ/WRITE speed, and NO HDD drive will beat the access time/latency of the SSD solutions. As I said, the price of the controller alone is very steep, so I don't think there's a cheaper alternative to the ST PCIe solution.

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Tue Oct 20, 2009 10:12 am

And here's the review: http://hothardware.com/articles/OCZ-ZDrive-m84-PCIExpress-SSD-Review/

Amazing results and numbers...

If we look at large sequential transfers, the Z-Drive competes handily with even a 4 x Intel X25M RAID 0 array, in fact blowing it out of the water in write performance

[tived]

by tived » Wed Oct 21, 2009 12:31 am

If you are going to spend this amount of money you would probably be much better off if you buy a small fibre channel disk array with a RAID controller. You can use 15K or 10K RPM drives and RAID 0. I will ask my friend where I worked on clustered file systems with fibre channel arrays for a solution that is a less expensive and works well. Having actual experience with the different vendors is important as some products to not deliver what the company promises. I can put you in touch with somebody who might recommend which type of hardware to explore as they have much experience. This is an engineer and not a sales person.

Be carefull about using RAID that is actually software RAID. A hardware RAID controller with dedicated on board RAM performs much better.

Your Fibre Channel (FC) will not be as fast as PCIe or PCI-X, and I doubt it will even be as fast as eSATA. FC is more competing with networks such as gigabit or 10_Gigabit networks, but i could be wrong its happen once or twice before :-)

thanks for sharing

Henrik

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Wed Oct 28, 2009 2:26 pm

http://hothardware.com/News/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Sneak-Peek/

We're looking at such numbers:
- 80GB for unknown price, but must be much cheaper than 3000$, as their enterprise solution is priced at that point and this is consumer-grade, which the company said will be much more accessible
- 800MB/s read
- 300MB/s write

Also, the non-Pro version is for single card/drive use only, while the Pro allows you to install multiple cards and RAID them !

[Phil Howard]

by Phil Howard » Wed Nov 25, 2009 4:26 pm

It seems the perspective in the IT world (I work in the IT world) is that if you can read all of the SSD data in just a second or two, it was too small Really, they see the SSD market as a demand for fast DATA in large quantity, such as searching data warehouses. As a Linux distro builder, I'd look at a SMALL (not more than 16GB) and VERY FAST (600 MB/s or faster on PCIe 8x or 16x) SSD as a way to either run the OS extremely fast, or load the entire system into large RAM in just a few seconds at boot time. For my high volume data, which is now in the few terabytes range, cost is a factor because it is growing faster than the wallet. Most of it doesn't need to be fast so $100/TB beats $5000/TB. Both prices will come down in time. My compromise at the momemt is SATA-II attached in the 250 MB/s speed range. I've seen these in 32GB, 64GB, 80GB, 128GB, and 160GB. I picked the Intel X25-E 32GB drive (around $432) but all of the vendors I deal with are out of stock on it. If someone would make a 32GB PCIe 8x SSD in a reasonable price for the speed, I'd have a look.

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Wed Nov 25, 2009 4:33 pm

It seems we see eye to eye on those matters, Mr Howard. Just wanted to point that out