Start-up Claims SSD Achieves 180,000 IOPS

Lucas123 writes "Three-year-old start-up Pliant Technology today announced the general availability of a new class of enterprise SAS solid state disk drives that it claims without using any cache can achieve up to 180,000 IOPS for sustained read/write rates of 500MB/sec and 320MB/sec, respectively. The company also claims an unlimited number of daily writes to its new flash drives, guaranteeing 5 years of service with no slowdown. 'Pliant's SSD controller architecture is not vastly different from those of other high-end SSD manufacturers. It has twelve independent I/O channels to interleaved single level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips from Samsung Corp. The drives are configured as RAID 0 for increased performance.'"

Considering they're in RAID 0

[toppavak]

And Intel's enterprise-class SSDs already offer sustained speeds of up to 250MB/s read and 170MB/s write, wouldn't read speeds of approximately 500MB/s and write speeds of over 300MB/s be expected?

Re:/me gets out the tub o' salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually current SSD's are bottlenecked by the SATA connection at 300MB/s read so getting 500 with specialized hardware doesn't seem all that fantastic.

Wonder what controller they used

[afidel]

With all the fast SSD's I've tested I've found the controllers to be a bigger bottleneck than the SSD itself. I've seen 50% performance gains on the Intel x-25e's simply by hooking them to a second machine with a different controller. Even with the best performer (Intel ICH9) I still had the feeling that the controller might have been holding the drive back a bit. Haven't tried it with an ICH10 based board yet though so perhaps there's significant improvements there. (on further reading they claim to be using SAS, I'm not aware of any really high performance SAS chipsets, they all seem to be targeted at RAID's of traditional HDD's and so can't keep up with SSD, I'd really be interested in some details of their test).

Re:I've used pre-production versions. They are FAS

[Robotbeat]

Well, I don't know the whole setup, just that it was about 10 drives (15k) SCSI (not SAS) in a RAID 5. I don't know how much cache. It was a Clarion unit. But, the customer thinks, "Wow, your little box that I've never heard of has just beaten EMC." They don't get into the technical details when they make that sort of decision.

Unlimited writes?

[pmontra]

From TFA:

they're also able to claim unlimited program and erase [write/erase] cycles,

They're using SLC NAND flash which has a lower wear than MLC NAND [wikipedia.org] but that doesn't mean there is no wear at all. It looks like a nice drive anyway.

Re:I've used pre-production versions. They are FAS

[Guspaz]

Two problems:

1) They're bottlenecked by SAS, which, if they're using 3gbit controllers, probably won't go that much higher than ~500MB/s

2) Their cost is probably insane, if they're setting the upper bounds at $6000

By comparison, Fusion-IO claims 100,000 IOPS (not as high, but not far off) on their drives, and are about to introduce a new model for $895. They use a PCI-e 4x slot, which assuming v1.x, should give them about 10gbit/s (before overhead) to play with.

Also, Woz is their chief scientist, so bonus.

The newer version of SAS would bump up the interface to 6gbit, but then, PCI-e 2.0 would bump a 4x slot up to 20gbit/s.

In short, it seems to me that the future of super high performance drives is in PCI-e rather than SAS.

Re:I've used pre-production versions. They are FAS

[Diabolus Advocatus]

You are using comparing HDD's in a Clariion to your SSD's. Not a very fair comparison. Why not compare your box to a Symmetrix V-Max with SSD's, or even a DMX with SSD's. What you've done is like sticking a Ferrari engine into a Lada and compared it to say a Ford Focus and saying that your's wins. Just because your engine is faster doesn't mean your product is better.

Re:SAS not SATA

[LifesABeach]

I'm curious what a 100 Peta Byte configuration would look like?