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Intel Takes SATA Performance Crown With X25-E SSD
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Nov 24, 2008 10:21 PM
from the bragging-rights dept.
from the bragging-rights dept.
theraindog writes "We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors off the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s, and offers ten times the lifespan of its predecessor, all while retaining Intel's wicked-fast storage controller and crafty Native Command Queuing support. The Extreme isn't cheap, of course, but The Tech Report's in-depth review of the drive suggests that if you consider its cost in terms of performance, the X25-E actually represents good value for demanding multi-user environments."
Related Stories
[+]
Intel's First SSD Blows Doors Off Competition 282 comments
theraindog writes "Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."
[+]
Long-Term Performance Analysis of Intel SSDs 95 comments
Vigile writes "When the Intel X25-M series of solid state drives hit the market last year, there was little debate that they were easily the best performing MLC (multi-level cell) offerings to date. The one area in which they blew away the competition was with write speeds — initial reviews showed consistent 80MB/s results. However, a new article over at PC Perspective that looks at Intel X25-M performance over a period of time shows that write speeds are dramatically reduced from everyday usage patterns. Average write speeds are shown to drop to half (40MB/s) or less in the worst cases, though the author does describe ways that users can recover some of the original drive speed using standard HDD testing tools."
Reader MojoKid contributes related SSD news that researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a new power supply system which will significantly reduce power consumption for NAND Flash memory.
[+]
Intel 34nm SSDs Lower Prices, Raise Performance 195 comments
Vigile writes "When Intel's consumer line of solid state drives were first introduced late in 2008, they impressed reviewers with their performance and reliability. Intel gained a lot of community respect by addressing some performance degradation issues found at PC Perspective by quickly releasing an updated firmware that solved those problems and then some. Now Intel has its second generation of X25-M drives available, designated by a "G2" in the model name. The SSDs are technically very similar though they use 34nm flash rather than the 50nm flash used in the originals and reduced latency times. What is really going to set these new drives apart though, both from the previous Intel offerings and their competition, are the much lower prices allowed by the increased memory density. PC Perspective has posted a full review and breakdown of the new product line that should be available next week."
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Dedicated Database Storage (Score:4, Informative)
This just screams dedicated database storage.
wicked-fast door blowing screams? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:wicked-fast door blowing screams? (Score:5, Interesting)
You be the judge [techreport.com]. I would consider a factor of 80x improvement in IO/s over the best HDD, and 2x your best competitor (yourself) "wicked-fast door blowing screams" if you're looking at transaction processing for a database or other IOPS bound application. This is not the review that's overzealous about a 4% processor speed improvement. Stripe that across 5 or 10 of these bad boys and the upside potential is, um, noticable? If we can't get a little enthusiastic about that what does merit it? A flame paint job and racing stripes? A Ferrari logo? The next step up from here is RAMdisk. Yeah, it's not going to make Vista boot in 4 seconds. Is that the metric that's driving you?
Capacity is still lacking at 32GB, but obviously they could expand it now and 64GB will be available next year. Naturally if they wanted to make a 3.5" form factor they could saturate the bandwidth of the interface and stuff 320GB into a drive with no problem if they wanted to court the folks who can (and most definitely would) pay $10,000 for that premium product (HINT HINT). Obviously the price bites, but they can get it for this, so why not? Naturally for challenging environments (vibration, rotation, dropping under use, space applications, heat) it's a big win all the way around. Isn't SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) due soon?
I think I foresaw some of these improvements here some years ago. I'm glad to see them in use. If I were to look forward again I would say that it might be time to abandon the euphemism of a hard disk drive for flash storage, at least for high end devices. You can already reconfigure these chips in the above mentioned 320GB drive to saturate a PCIe 2.0 x4 link (20Gigatransfers/sec), which makes a nice attach for Infiniband DDR x4. The SATA interface allows a synthetic abstraction that is useful, but the useful part is that it's an abstraction -- you don't need to continue the cylinder/block/sector metaphor once you accept the utility of the abstraction.
Parent
Re:wicked-fast door blowing screams? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now plug these things into your SAN -- because they plug right in -- and do the math again. 50% price premium for 80x the aggregate IOPS and 10x the bandwidth? Your SAN needs new connectors to handle the speed.
This is a slam dunk. Admit it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"our Lotus Notes servers are almost as rough on the SAN as the DB servers, huge numbers of IOPS and almost as much storage."
I have no idea if you fall into this category, but many, MANY Domino administrators who implement with a SAN do so in a suboptimal fashion. A Domino server should have considerable resources on local drives even if you are committed to a SAN for your primary data storage. All system NSFs should be stored on local drives, as well as your transaction log (you are using transaction logs
Re:Dedicated Database Storage (Score:5, Funny)
This just screams dedicated database storage.
NO, THIS JUST SCREAMS DEDICATED DATABASE STORAGE!!!
filter
fodder
Parent
Software development (Score:2)
My first thought is builds. I have to do Windows CE 5.0 builds all the time and they're almost entirely I/O bound. I've also compiled Xfree86 before at another job. It seems like the really large compiles are mostly I/O bound. The CPU doesn't peg, but the hard drive light stays lit.
Something like this would be fantastic for development. I really want one.
Re:Software development (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I often do compiles (Gentoo) on a ram disk.
Linux desktop systems doesnt use anywhere near the amount of ram modern systems have so just make a tmpfs mount and the compiles fly. :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you even read the summary?
We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors of the competition
Oh, gimme more of that door knob!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So why the fuck isn't it SAS?
Good price, actually. (Score:2)
Considering I have a couple of HP DL380 G5s with 2.5" 72GB 15K SAS drives, each set me back about $600 (after education discount) ... the cost of this drive $738.84 with a truckload of performance to boot is a heck of a deal.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup, and it uses SLC chips so it has an enormously long lifetime, around 70 years according to Intel.
Re: (Score:2)
70 years of doing what exactly?
Its entirely workload dependent.
Re:Good price, actually. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
SAS has taken over SCSI's role as the drive of choice to sell to customers who are willing to overpay for the cache of owning a premium product.
You could have guessed that from the full name: Serial Attached SCSI. I guess if you can't buy a new media technology from Sony, this'll work.
Re: (Score:2)
15K drives exist for a reason (at least they did until now), and they're only available in SAS or FC. I suspect the SAS version is actually the cheap one.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's where I would go with a useful link [techworld.com]. "Duplex" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means in this context. The use of this term bare is misleading, as perhaps the marketing person who invented the meme intended to be.
"FYI, SAS full duplex means that one channel can be used for data traffic and the other channel can be simultaneously used for command traffic. Both channels cannot be simultaneously used for data. So when Mr Batty says 6Gb/s is available and that's 4x SATA I, he is technically correct, but end users will not see 4x performance."
If you can't sell on the features, it's ok for some people to make stuff up when they're selling. But not us, here, ok? Let's be honest with one another here around the water cooler.
proper comparison? (Score:2)
Re:proper comparison? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who tells you SSDs are a replacement for disks is at best talking about some niche workloads and at worst trying to sell you a line of the old BS. SSDs render 15k rpm disks obsolete all right, but not in the way you're suggesting.
To get the same capacity as you'd get out of those hot, expensive disks - which is not a lot given what you're paying for them - you'd need to spend much more, and you'll likely find that performance levels off quickly when you saturate out your HBAs and/or CPUs and/or memory bus and/or front-end connectivity. Much better to combine a few of these with slow, cool, cheap disks to maximise both performance and capacity at a lower price than the 15k disks.
Let's take an example.
Suppose you have 14 146GB 15k rpm disks. They cost you $2000 apiece, or $28000. Each one gives you 300 IOPS, for a total of 4200 (we'll ignore the costs and inefficiencies of the hardware RAID dinosaur you're probably using these with; if we didn't, you might start to feel stupid about it). So you spent about $6.67/IOPS or $14/GB, plus the power and cooling to keep those disks spinning. Not cheap. Not particularly fast. Not really great in any way.
Suppose instead that you want to replace them with these 80GB SSDs. You'll probably pay your vendor around $1400 for them (figure 60% margin like they're getting on those FC drives you've been buying from them). Now you need 26 of them to get the same capacity, costing you $36400. But you get about 12000 read IOPS each (write latency suspiciously omitted from this fluff piece, but we'll dubiously assume it's similar - it almost certainly isn't anywhere close) for a total of 312000. Too bad your HBA can do only about 140000, so you'll max out there on random reads. And if we're talking about block sizes larger than 512 bytes, latency will be higher. So you've spent $0.26/IOPS, which is great, and you've saved money on operating costs as well. But you actually spent a lot more in total - $18/GB - and woe unto you if you need more capacity; demand for storage tends to double every 12-18 months, and adding in 80GB chunks at $18/GB is going to hurt. Sure, prices will drop, but not fast enough to be competitive with the multi-TB disks we're already seeing today.
Finally, suppose instead that you buy 2 of these SSDs to act as log devices and then buy 4 1TB 7200rpm SAS disks for $350 each. You've spent $4200 and you've gotten 24000 IOPS. That's $0.18/IOPS or $0.48/GB, and you've actually spent much less in absolute terms as well. You're still spending only a tiny fraction in power and cooling of what you were spending on the original all-disk solution, and you've got twice as much total storage capacity. Best of all, you can now grow your storage in two dimensions, not just along a line fixed by the disk vendors. Need more IOPS? Add another SSD or two. Need more capacity or streaming bandwidth? Add some more rotating rust.
This approach gives you the best of all worlds, something you can't get by blindly replacing all your disks with SSDs. In other words, you get to pick the spot along the performance/cost/capacity curve that's right for your application. Using only SSDs, only slow disks, or only expensive disks doesn't do that. Upon a moment's though, this should be obvious: when your computer needs to perform better, adding DRAM is usually the best way to make that happen. When it needs to store more data, adding disks is the way to go. You don't add disks to improve performance (one hopes... if you need to do that, your storage vendor is probably taking you to strip clubs) and you don't add DRAM to increase storage capacity. This is no different. Flash occupies an intermediate spot in the memory hierarchy and has to be thought of that way. It's exciting to see the prices fall and capacities rise like they have, but I don't think a lot of people really understand yet just how SSDs are going to change things.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do a test based on price.
$x,xxx worth of SAS/SCSI disks vs $x,xxx worth of SSD drives.
See which is faster then.
Thats the most realistic benchmark (for people without infinitely deep pockets).
It's not about speed to me (Score:2)
Re:It's not about speed to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
A 72 year lifespan? How much more improvement do you need? It seems like price is the only remaining hurdle for SSDs.
Re: (Score:2)
Why no swapping, journaling, logging or timestamps? Wear leveling is pretty standard fair for SSDs and AFAIK, at least three of those won't write a significant amount of data to the disk.
I find it strange... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's pretty much apples and oranges. Even with batteries (which I wouldn't trust) RAM has different characteristics in power consumption, heat output, storage density etc. By the time you address these challenges you'd have... an SSD.
Plus the SSDs get their long life from having more raw storage than advertised, and dynamically shutting down dead areas and bringing in reserve areas as it ages. Your sums would have to take into account the cost of this "hidden" storage.
As an aside the best use for these thin
Re: (Score:2)
Why would the calculations have to take in to account the hidden storage?
Thats overhead for using SSD technology. Its unnecessary for any other storage.
Adding ram purely for disk cache will increase performance many times better than using SSDs.
Cheaper too.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but some legacy operating systems can only address 4G of RAM (including the graphics card). Also, some hardware may not be able to take more ram. I can't think of any machine where 64G of ram is very cheap.
Lousy storage density, insane price. (Score:2, Informative)
Let's see...$720 [newegg.com] for 32GB ($22/GB) versus $278 for 256GB [newegg.com] ($1/GB.)
Keep in mind that you could buy two of those 256GB drives, mirror them, and exceed (in all likelihood) the performance of the Intel drive, and have eight times as much storage. Since reliability is pretty unproven, having them in a mirror means your ass is suitably covered.
The absolute lowest storage density (SAS doesn't come in anything less than 36GB, and 300GB is the top-end) at $22/GB, when $4/GB is the norm for SAS drives (that's a p
Re:Lousy storage density, insane price. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You got my hopes up. That's 128GB.
it costs more per gb than ram! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it costs more per gb than ram! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Question for slashdotters: (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens when the read-write cycles on this run out?
Re:Question for slashdotters: (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Question for slashdotters: (Score:5, Informative)
It becomes a very fast cdrom - read only.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A *much* better failure model than HDDs forgetting about data on dodgy sectors etc.
Weak test system (Score:5, Interesting)
NCQ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why the heck does a drive that has uniform, low latency random access would even NEED NCQ? NCQ was designed to optimize the seek order in mechanical drives with heads.
Re:NCQ? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Does the performance degrade with use? (Score:3, Interesting)
The earlier model of Intel SSD had some serious performance degradation [matbe.com] after a few hours of heavy use. (Article in French, but it says that after a ten minute torture with IOmeter writing small blocks to the drive, and even after waiting an hour for the drive to 'recover', performance drops by about 70%.) I wonder if they have fixed this bug with the new model?
Performance crown and new-school math (Score:3, Insightful)
We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors of the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s
Yet, 5 articles down the Slashdot homepage, options depending:
Samsung said it's now mass producing a 256GB solid state disk that it says has sequential read/write rates of 220MB/sec and 200/MBsec, respectively.
I'm pretty sure the improved write speeds is the part that people are interested in with SSDs these days.
Non-volatile RAM disk ? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the techreport article :
Is it time to look at connecting these chips direct to the motherboard ? Avoiding the added complexity of driving what is essentially a block of memory via a serial interface designed to control spinning discs. If the SLC memory chips were mapped into the main memory address space, it should be possible to make them look like a 32G or 64G (NV)RAM drive on a Unix/Linux system. Mount '/' and '/boot' on the (NV)RAM drive and install the OS on it. Presto - very fast boot and load times. You can still use traditional spinning disc(s) for large data, mounted as separate data partitions.
It would need some thought as to which parts of the filesystem went on spinning disc and which parts went on the (NV)RAM partition. But that is why Unix/Linux has all of the tools for mounting different parts of the filesystem on different partitions. Back in the olden days, most systems had a combination of small fast(ish) discs and big(ish) slow discs, and tweaking fstab to mount different parts of the filesystem on different discs was a standard part of the install process. Most desktop systems now have one huge disc, and the standard Linux install dumps everything on one big '/' partition, but all the tools for optimizing the partition layout are still there.
How about an ultra quiet desktop workstation with no moving parts, the OS installed on (NV)RAM disc, and user data dragged across the network from a fileserver (e.g NFS mounted /home).
Fusion IOdrive is faster (Score:3, Interesting)
The Fusion IOdrive is faster...about 510 Mb/s according to dvnation. At $30/GB, that's not bad. Granted, the Intel one is $22/GB...but it has about twice the performance; and it's only priced about 1.4x the price of the Intel ssd.
Re:Blowing doors of competition (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
NCQ gives the SSD something to do while the host is figuring out what to write or read next. Normally it's used to allow the host to fire and forget 32 commands. In this case, you queue up a bunch of stuff, then figure out what to queue next.
SSDs are so much faster that the host is generally not keeping up with it.
Re:NCQ on an SSD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if it's solid state, there's still a physical layer, and still a logical-to-physical abstraction that an IDE disk must perform. (Slashdot pedantics will please note that here an IDE disk means a disk with an integrated electronic controller, not just a drive with an ATA interface. If you've never had to know the true physical geometry -- the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors in a disk (CHS)-- to tell your PC's BIOS or OS, you've never used a non-IDE disk. Most BIOS systems were faking CHS numbers by the time EIDE hit in 1994 which eliminated CHS in favor of LBA.)
Flash drives use NAND flash memory, which uses pages of up to about 4 KB. For the most part, you can only access a single page at a time. Additionally, sequential access within a page is almost always faster than random access. Giving the disk's integrated controller a list of values means that it can examine the queue intelligently and can perform paging operations more intelligently.
Parent