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 December 13th 2007 9:54AM
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.