Four X25-E Extreme SSDs Combined In Hardware RAID

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."

Actually, that RAID card seems more interesting

[the_humeister]

A 1.2 GHz processor with 256 DDR2 memory? Holy crap! That's faster than my new Celeron 220! And the perennial quesion: can this thing run Linux?

What I want to see

[XanC]

Is 4 of these in a RAID-1, running a seek-heavy database. Nobody does this benchmark, unfortunately.

If I keep my current 15K drives that long

[Shivetya]

I will be surprised.

See, in the enterprise environment that I work in the majority of our big hardware is leased. I am quite willing to use what I can to maintain performance and reliability. That being said my system is built entirely on 15K drives of various sizes. I am not worried about five years or so of read/write that SSD drives have, all I want to see is a track record. I expect to replace most of the drives I have now within five years so this "five year limit" many like to toss out is immaterial to me. Reliability over that lifetime is of more importance.

Besides, the nice benefit of SSD drives is I don't need special enclosures (read: ones that can handle the torque these puppies can put out)

Re:paging benefits?

[Vectronic]

I'm no expert, but wouldn't that be a redundant statistic? if it handles normal read/writes faster than a disk drive, then could you presume paging would be faster as well?

Although it would be interesting to see a RAM-less PC try and run on SSD's only... somehow using normal data read/write, and memory read/write on the same SSD (if thats possible). Guess that's what we'll end up with eventually anyways, where your amount of MEM is the amount of free-space you have on your SSD, no longer seperated components.

Re:Oh good

[bluefoxlucid]

All modern hard drives are Winchester drives; Winchester drives are just the first iteration, made by IBM, who figured they'd ship two 30MB platters and name the hard drive after the Winchester 30-30 rifle. Who the hell modded you insightful, especially for claiming a system of delicate moving parts lasts virtually forever...

Re:What I want to see

[Aqualung812]

Why not run RAID-5 (or 50 or 15) if it is seek-heavy? I thought RAID-1 was only used if you had to deal with a lot of writes. Those are slower on 5 than 1, but 5 is much faster for reads.

Re:paging benefits?

[Wonko the Sane]

* AMD opteron boards can use ordinary DDR2 but the CPU performance sucks compared to the aforementioned xeons.

If you go multiprocessor (not multicore) then you get much higher memory bandwidth (NUMA). Sometimes that matters more than CPU power.

Re:Oh good

[CMonk]

I think you're comparing against SATA drives. People that worry about IOPS are normally using FC drives which are much more closely aligned in price with SSDs. (btw, been a while since I was in the market for FC drives)

Re:Oh good

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this take into account things like, half the drive is filled with stuff that doesn't change or does it imply nothing is on the drive and you just keep writing to it for no reason? ie that would drop those MTBF factors by half? Tried to wrap my brain around wear leveling and can't seem to grasp it.

Re:Oh good

[DMalic]

It's obvious sarcasm.

Re:paging benefits?

[ErikZ]

I'm Betaing Windows 7. Before going to bed I set up a swap partition for it. After getting up the next morning and checking, it was full.

I have *no idea* what W7 put in there while I was sleeping.

USB flash drive RAID?

[hack slash]

When will someone come up with a hardware or software RAID solution to enable several USB flash drives to appear as a single drive on Windows? with relatively reliable & fast (12MB/s write, 30MB/s read) 16GB flash drives as cheap as £16 each [play.com] I'd love to cram as many as I could inside my Eee and have them appear as a single drive instead of many individual drives.

I hate to ask but...

[Douglas Goodall]

As SSD drives come into the market used, how will people know how close these drives are to "used up". That is to say, we will have to worry that these cheap drives on ebay will have lots of "bad" spots that can no longer be written. We are going to be needing a program or device of some kind that can certify the state of a drive so as to set a fair value on it. I expect a lot of unhappy people when used drives get installed and start failing soon after. There will have to be some pretty sleazy warrantees to cover used SSDs.

Agreed

[LostMyBeaver]

My wife who loves me very much bought me the 28 port 512mb version of this hard drive controller for Christmas and I have loved it, but I feel like I'm wasting it by running it in a shitty Core 2 Quad motherboard instead of a Xeon motherboard.

I have actually run this exact controller in a Pentium M motherboard during my 3ware to Adaptec transition phase, and the results are entirely different. Especially since the Adaptec drivers are poorly suited for single core systems. After all, you just don't add a $300-$1700 controller to a computer that costs more to ship than to buy on eBay.

So far as I'm concerned, the test is entirely unrealistic and invalid. It's time these guys "rebooted" and got at least a quad core PC, at least using the x58 chipset, bus performance is less of an issue and peripherals should perform at their full potential.