Four X25-E Extreme SSDs Combined In Hardware RAID 228
theraindog writes "Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD is easily the fastest flash drive on the market, and contrary to what one might expect, it actually delivers compelling value if you're looking at performance per dollar rather than gigabytes. That, combined with a rackmount-friendly 2.5" form factor and low power consumption make the drive particularly appealing for enterprise RAID. So just how fast are four of them in a striped array hanging off a hardware RAID controller? The Tech Report finds out, with mixed but at times staggeringly impressive results."
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Insightful)
'cause regular hard drives usually survive 5 years in an enterprise environment, yep yep.
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Insightful)
'cause SSD's don't cost $300-$500 more than their spindle counterparts, yep yep.
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be sure to do that, and replace them every 5 years when they run out of write operations.
Winchester drives, on the other hand, use a time-honored complex system of delicate moving parts, and last virtually forever. They certainly do not start experiencing sudden failures if kept in continuous service for more than 5 years.
Re:paging benefits? (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't get this obsession with page files these days. Say you have 4GB ram and an 4GB page file. Memory is cheap these days, so rather than using 4GB of (relatively slow) SSD, why not just get another 4GB ram?
Comparisons a little unfair in places (Score:5, Insightful)
It seemed a little unfair that they only used the nice hardware RAID controller with the Intel SSDs. I would have liked to see them use it with all the other disks to get a more level playing field.
Re:paging benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think anyone should be using a page file at all if you have 4 GB or more of RAM. Maybe even 2 GB. It just doesn't make sense. With that much memory what good is a 512 MB page file going to do really? And if you're swapping more than 512 MB of RAM to disk your machine is going to be thrashing like mad and unusable anyway.
It's stupid that many OS's allocate 2 times your RAM as a page file. Are you really going to swap 8 GB of RAM to disk? I mean seriously, that would be unusable.
Even when I had 2 GB of RAM I never used a swap file and now with low-end machines running 8+ GB (only about $100 of RAM), page files just don't make sense any more.
Fantastic Slashvertising (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD is easily the fastest flash drive on the market, and contrary to what one might expect, it actually delivers compelling value if you're looking at performance per dollar rather than gigabytes
I hope someone got a healthy commission from Intel for writing that...
Re:Actually, that RAID card seems more interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I felt that the limiting factor was probably the craptastic single-core Pentium 4 EE [techreport.com] they used to run all these benchmarks.
What, you shove thousands of dollars worth of I/O into a system, and run it through the paces with a CPU that sucked in 2005? I'm not surprised at all that most tests showed very little improvement with the RAID.
Re:Redundant Array of what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
MTBF is a highly inaccurate way to show how long you should expect a drive to live. The whole Seagate Fiasco is a prime example of why NOT to believe them.
Misuse of a statistical figure is a problem with those misinterpreting it. Obviously things have changed since schools taught the difference between the mean, the mode, the median, and the minimum. If I run an ISP then MTBF is useful for me to calculate costs, both in replacements and labour costs. It's not supposed to be a measurement for consumers though that will be buying single unit quantities.
Buying a hard drive is like buying a washing machine. If I'm lucky it will go on practically for ever. On the other hand if I'm unlucky it could die tomorrow. As Piranhaa says, there are too many variables. All I can go on is that if it comes with a garauntee of 3 years then I assume the manufacturers have designed it to mostly exceed that figure otherwise they would end up losing money on the product. I still have to ensure I have a contingency plan in case it breaks down.
Phillip.