Listen, we know you think your RAID setup is pretty snazzy, and, truth be told, it probably makes our rig look silly by comparison. However, in the computer world, there's always someone out there with a
bigger, nastier system -- and we've just spotted one of the nastiest of them all. Next Level Hardware is a site that specializes in putting outrageous setups to the test, and this time they haven't disappointed with their benchmarks on the
Mtron 16GB SSD (reportedly the fastest SATA drive in the world). Oh, did we mention the test was on a RAID 0 array of
nine drives? Dubbed the "Battleship Mtron," the sickening collection of hardware blazed past the competition (a WD Raptor, less stacked Mtron RAID setups), delivering mind-boggling data swaps like copying a 1GB folder in four seconds. You read that right: four seconds. Like where this is headed? Truck over to the test page and peep all the stats... seriously, it's upsetting.
[Thanks, David]
posted Dec 13th 2007 9:54AM
I am now quezy with a hard on....
Can I see O.o?
Well, when they talk about SS, they aint talking about your D. ;)
SSD is the obvious future. No Moving Parts, data flowing near the speed of light. Once the technology gets there I expect TERABYTE/sec transfer rates.
data doesn't flow at the light of speed in SSDs. and that picture sure looks like a bunch of SATA drives. I don't see any SSDs.
It's an SSD with SATA interface. I'd expect quicker transfer rates than 1GB/s.
You're an idiot. SATA is a connection interface not a hard drive design. You just made an ass of yourself.
And the reason for that couldn't possibly be that the SSD drives use the SATA interface right? Cause thats just craziness. And if you notice, Flashpoint said once the technology gets there. I'm pretty sure he doesn't think that SSD transfer data at the speed of light. Now please go troll elsewhere.
Actually Ryan, you made an ass of yourself. He posted a comment and didn't anywhere say he was a God on the subject. He also didn't insult anyone to prove his point.
Ellianth's right, this guy just said that's what it looks like, hell, he might have even been covertly asking if the pic engadget used was of the actual array, or if it was a generic pic they used to represent the concept of the post they were making, it's been done before.
With his other comment in mind, it's probably just that he only read the post and didn't look at the test page.
He didn't call anyone a fool, or say that people were morons for being fooled, just that is what it LOOKS like. So really, there is no need to jump on his ass for making his comment about the sata drive. Unless that's your preference, but I guess that would make you (I'll let you come up with whatever applicable generic aspersions on your character that should go here)
That's all well and good, but he did also say "I don't see any SSDs" which makes the rest of his comments look more like he really thought they were regular SATA HDDs...
Well... I don't know about you, but, I RTFA and, even then, you don't have to... just look at the drives... they say MTRON on the side! And also, if you'd pay any attention, you'd notice that the drives aren't oriented like normal SATA HDD's, the connectors for those are oriented on a longer end of the drives and not a shorter end like normal 3.5" HDD's...
So...
I think all of your arguments are moot, except for those who are talking about the tech getting to light speed transfers one day.
Sorry to sound like a flame...
Just use your eyes from time to time.
GR
I think the doom case "mod" is the sickest of all systems. however, it having a SSD raid 0 wouldnt hurt either.
hahaha four seconds. That made me giggle out loud. I can't wait until I build a new computer to check out SSDs :D
Isnt it "for all intents and purposes"? not "for all intensive purposes" as in paragraph one. We all know tech, people. lets not forget grammatical technology even though it's old.
+1
It scares me how many people don't know that.
He's using a pun or something - it counts as grammatically correct because what he's describing (the SSD setup) is "intense".
Did they use vista for testing? "1GB folder in four seconds". Then I would be seriously impressed. lol.
Vista would slow down the transfer rate to 1GB per hour I think.
@Eriq
That's the problem, you tried thinking.
^ lol
HD Tach version 3.0.4.0 - For non-commercial or evaluation use only, see license agreement.
But what's the point?
I mean, really... How much porn do you have that you need such a setup? I can't imagine anyone of the hardcore nerds who does this sort of thing would have enough business data to measures it in terabytes, so it's GOT to be porn.
Well, I suppose it could be pirated music or movies, too.
All I know is that these sorts of RAID arrays are typically owned by guys who don't change their shirt but once a month, and who have a home/room filled with computer parts and cables strewn all over the place. I can't imagine they have any real need for such a setup, but just do it because it carries nerd cred.
By the way, I'm differentiating between geek (someone who has a few non-mainstream hobbies) and nerd (someone with few social graces who obsesses over math or computer guts.) I've been both at one time or another. No offense it meant by the use of the word "nerd", although some offense is meant with the insinuation that they have no lives and thus nothing to put on these hard drives aside from illegal data and porn.
And for the inevitable question, "So what is *your* hard drive filled with Mr. Smartass?" the answer is "applesauce."
No, really, it's porn and downloaded music. I just don't need a terabyte of it.
Let the cranky responses. . . Begin!
Are you... talking to yourself?
Games dude. I know that's what I would fill it with. I would love to have every game I own all installed at the same time. And then the game run blazingly fast due to insane read speeds.
But maybe that's just me.
The strength of SSD is the seek times, not the bandwidth. Though it's nice to know they can put out a lot of bandwidth, too :)
Porn drives progress.
sorry to add in the obvious.. but this is a 9 drive raid of *16GB* drives.. that adds up to less then 145 GB's most newer laptops have more then that theses days.
Just because you don't have anything useful to put on your hard drive doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't.
Data bases would EAT THIS UP!
Businesses will LOVE big SSD's in a RAID array's.
EZ. How about Digital Intermediate?
We are talking about holding a movie Digitally with almost all the data from the film.
This frames are easily 50-60MEGS EACH & u need to load 24 of those every second SUSTAINED.
you do the math ;-)
-F
Pretty cool until one fails :). Props to them for doing it though, someone has to!
Well, reliability is one of SSDs strongs so...
@puntz:
But I thought that SSD still had a problem with limited re-write functions, does it not? This would be great for archival data or data that is read but not written properly, but I wouldn't recommend using it as a boot drive with all of the temp files that Windows writes under normal operations.
Or has a lot of progress been made on the re-write reliability of SSDs and I missed it?
Good frickin' Lord, do I need caffeine!! Corrected statement...
"This would be great for archival data or data that is read but not written frequently"
Frequently. WTF good would it be if data is not written properly?! :) Jolt! Bawls! Come to me! I need you!
The fact is that the original SSD drives, flash drives included, had fairly low read / write limits, I think the last statistic I heard quoted for modern drives is that you could write / rewrite every bit on the drives for several years continuously before you hit the limit.
the video of vista booting has me in tears
If it were my array, I'd put some airflow between those drives.
But that's just me.
Serious question related to this comment: CAN you stack SSDs on top of one another like that with no heat concerns? Do they really run that cool? If so, now THAT'S cool!
I also would probably put some airflow between the drives, but since they are SSD they have way fewer moving parts than a standard HD. This cuts down the heat output by a huge amount. Doesn't reduce it to zero, but enough that stacking them like that probably isn't a big deal.
Indeed, I do agree Peter. And besides not like it looks the part anyway... ;)
I wonder how many miles of cable the dude used.
Here in work, back in 2005, I was involved in hands-on load testing of our production database server on a couple of competing 128Gb solid state disk systems, including a Texas Systems RAMSAN, Solid Access flash-based drives, and Baydel Maracite systems. They were appallingly expensive, around the $100k mark, and appallingly quick -- some of my synthetic tests recorded 1 gigabyte per second read speed and 900 megabyte per second write speed. Us engineer types recommended the purchase but the business nixed it in the end.
It was so fast that we broke Windows software RAID, which we were using for one of the configs that didn't have hardware RAID support -- in fact, we are the uncredited source of the quote in the fourth paragraph of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/harder_hard_drives/.
Well I was starting to get a little envious until I did some comparisons. I have a 4x160gb sata/300 setup striped (which undoubtably cost a fraction of these 9 sdd drives). My rig does blow away anyone else I know, but I'm not this fast. I do have more than four times the disk space though.
I just tested for a little comparison, and it takes me twice as long (8 seconds) to copy a 1 gig file (and yes this is in Vista). Get the prices of these down and the capacities up and we have a winner, though they'll definitely be more worthwhile in laptops long before desktops mainly for the power consumption factor.
You forgot the 0.1ms seek time, my friend ;). Just one Mtron SSD can beat the hell out of your 4x RAID configuration in seek time (windows boot, visual studio code build, etc...)
Well, your striped array is only 4 drives, the other is 9. That should account for the speed difference.
What's the point does the speed of the drives saturate the bus? I remember an article a while back from tomshardware talking about stripe sets (this was with ide drives, so it's pretty old) and the fact that any more than four drives would essentially be faster than the speed at which the bus could transfer data. I know the bus of today is much faster, but how many striped drives would it take to make that the limiting factor?
That's why he used a 4x PCI-Express based RAID card. Theoretically he should have seen over 1Gbyte/sec sustained read but the chip on the RAID card couldn't handle more than 800 or so MBytes/sec. SATA 3.0 theoretically does 300MBytes/second best case but usually a bit lower with RAM drives.
Why again is this that impressive? $7,000 for a 150GB RAID? 1GB in 4sec?
So what. I have a 2TB RAID at work connected via fibre to a Mac Pro. I just copied a 2GB folder via Gigabit Ethernet RAID in 10 seconds. I haven't done all of the benchmarks, but you can surely get the kind of performance he's talking about from a standard RAID config - and for ALOT less money.
Sure an Xserve RAID is physically larger than 9 SSD drives, but at $7K for 150GB come on! I can get a 1TB Xserve RAID for $6K, add a fibe card for a couple hundred and I've got a fast big redundant RAID for $800 less than this.
I'll mention that my 4 disk (160gb seagate) array, mentioned in a couple posts up, cost me next to nothing (2 drives were $10 on black friday last year, the other 2 were about $50 each).
Did you even click on the read link?
You do realize that's physically impossible, right? Gigabit ethernet is only 100mbyte/s at 100% efficiency. The fastest you could be copying those files is 20seconds, and that is _extremely_ unlikely.
Yes I did read the article. That's why I posted. My problem with his entire testing and "comparison" is that he is comparing a SSD RAID 0 to a single WD 150GB drive. He states himself:
"The single drive folder copy performance was identical from a WDRaptor 150 to an Mtron 16GB Pro. All you have to do is add a second Mtron 16GB Pro into the mix and you will cut your combined read/write transfer time almost in half. Add 9 drives and copy/pasting 1GB will take under 4 seconds flat. These drives are incredible people!"
Well, all you have to do is add a second WDRaptor 150 to the mix and the same thing will happen - THAT'S THE POINT OF RAID 0!!!
That one comment invalidates his argument that "These drives are incredible people!" These drives aren't incredible, they perform just like any other drive. SSD has it's advantages, but speed is not the primary one. And if you're looking for a fast RAID, the $/performance ratio is just not there yet.
Actually Gigabit is 1000mbit/sec. So technically 125MB/sec maximum so 16sec. However I was copying from a local SAN volume over Gigabit to another machine with a local RAID, via AppleTalk which uses compression yada yada yada.
Anyway, my point is - even if my test wasn't incredibly scientific and accurate, the throughput of a much cheaper and more enterprise level RAID can easily match the speeds he is getting from this incredibly expensive RAID. (Oh and our RAID is level 5. So the throughput would be even faster if we didn't need the safety of RAID 5)
FYI the Fibre connection is dual 4Gb/sec, and we frequently max that out.
Erows is right, (2 GB) / (1 (Gb / sec)) = 16 seconds, and that's assuming zero overhead and traffic in the link.
Gotta love google calc: http://www.google.com/search?q=2GB+%2F+1Gb%2Fsec
As far as speed, personally 1GB in 4 seconds is much less important to me than large amounts of cheap redundant storage. Thus the reason I'm considering building a simple software raid 5 linux file server. On a related note, a few raid 0 (or 0+1) Cheetah 15k's should get about 80% of the above speed and are likely much less expensive.
Gigabyte i-RAM is MUCH cheaper and faster.
I-RAM at 4GB storage max isn't much of a comparison. Even though its based on RAM not flash the performance is only a little bit faster. I'll take 16GB of non volatile storage and a slight speed hit any day even if it is more expensive.
He should bench this thing against the Hyperdrive4.
Lets say your wife turns off the power to your computer one night, or the power goes off in your house. Goodbye to all of your completely volatile data on the I-Ram. Biggest waste of money IMO is the I-Ram, thats why you cant find them, and thats whey theyre not selling. SSD for the win.
how long to instal XP?
To everyone talking about file copy speeds - you're missing the point. A solid state array like this one may only get two or four times the performance of your fancy disk based systems, yes, and on that basis it may look like very poor value for money. But it's not about sequential transfer rates, it's about latency and random I/O speeds, and on those metrics solid state systems utterly crush disk ones. The ones we tested (see my post a few above this one) utterly crushed out disk based SAN, by hundreds to one; the disk based SAN was 60 15k RPM SCSI drives.
Now, why would you need or want this at home? No reason I can think of!
that, AND sound
9 ssd's are silent.
5-9 hard drives.... not so silent.
blah blah blah I'm going to scream at the top of my lungs that my thrown together array is so much better then this setup blah blah blah and then get mad because I don't understand what they are talking about because I didn't read the actual article
Seems to be some good knowledge here: Anybody have any suggestions as to where I can find good, plain-English info about RAID and/or NAS? After a recent drive crash, I want to do a better job at protecting my stuff, don't really know a good site for learning about it, and Google isn't always the best way to find the best info. Thanks in advance for any help!
omg stop reading my mind!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
There are a lot of good sites, here are a couple right off the top of my head.
http://www.cuddletech.com/veritas/raidtheory/x31.html
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=1491
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid5_gci1240568,00.html
But if you don't want to deal with backups yourself there are a couple of really decent and fairly inexpensive options.
Carbonite, Mozy, and soon google?
And the access time?.
I'm waiting for http://www.fusionio.com/ 'drives' ;)
In a year, this setup will seem slow. It's called progress, epecially in the technology relm.
Just think where the "iphone" (or other phones) will be in a couple years, or how cheap a blueray disk writer will be.
Why is this impressing everybody? We have fast SSD RAID0s with larger capacity everywhere now. 128, 256 are commonplace (See supertalent.com) and 512 GB SATA SSD drives are well on their way. Now RAID0 9 of those and get back to me.
And why the confusion on what good this application would be for? There are a lot of environments where moving parts and temperature are too much for spinning drives. Industry and military for example.
-d
I don't know if commonplace is the right term to use as I don't know anybody who uses SSD in the sizes you mention. I've heard of SSD using RAM modules on a card but again, I don't know of anyone using them either.
Doug,
Those high capacity SSD's from the manufacturers you mention are dediculously slow compared to the Mtron units. These are the fastest SSD's on the market. The supertalents, samsungs, ridatas, etc. you mentioned have a 40 to 60 MB/s sustained transfer rate and a true IOmeter measured sustained write performance of 20 to 24 MB/s. That is absolutely horrible to compared to these drives. You will not currently find any SSD remotely close to the performance spec of the Mtron. Thats why we are impressed.
Is this just neato because it's SSD? I think SSD is the bomb once it becomes more affordable as a solution, but 1GB in 4 seconds across 9 drives isn't really that impressive :P
If you do the math, that's 250MB/sec, /9 makes it about 28MB/sec per drive. That's pretty slow actually. Normal SATA hard drives can do about 60-70 MB/sec, and the raptor can do about 85 MB/sec This is based on a lot of testing I have personally done, trying to come up with the cheapest and best solution for my company for some servers. So if you had 9 "normal" drives, you could do a GB in 2 seconds. Or if they were raptors, it would be closer to 1.5 seconds. Now that's impressive! (And a hell of a lot cheaper too!)
I welcome the elimination of any "mechanical" storage medium. IMHO, which is the primary failure of data loss in a computer.
Just think of the weight lost without a mechanical harddrive, and the energy gained without it.
I suspect 256Gig versions by next summer, at affordable prices.
So, where's the comparison to 9 WD Raptors? It seems like that would be an important comparison.
The big question is why are we only talking about a 16GB drive here. I have a 8GB SD card with a 20MB transfer rate and it's just slightly bigger than my thumbnail. It seems like the manufacturer should be able to fit 12+ of those sized chips inside a 3.5" form factor and if they were internally striped together we should end up with some serious bandwidth to feed into the SATA 3.0 bus. Not to mention a 96GB drive. Then put 9 of those drives together in a RAID 0 and you'd probably get close to maxing out the bus.