24 Samsung SSDs get strung together for supercomputer fun
By Donald Melanson 
posted Mar 9th 2009 12:42PM
posted Mar 9th 2009 12:42PM
It wasn't all that long ago when a mere nine SSD drives in a RAID array was enough to cause most folks' jaws to drop, but the world of ridiculous technology exercises moves quickly, and we can only be thankful that a select few continually feel the need to one-up each other and share their results with all of us. This latest effort comes from a group enlisted by Samsung (in a not too thinly disguised marketing exercise), who paired up 24 SSDs in a RAID array totaling 6TB in size. Even more impressive than that, however, is the 2GB per second throughput speed they managed to achieve, which they naturally spared no expense in demonstrating -- as you can see in the video after the break.
[Via Reddit]
[Via Reddit]
Cool
Actually, it is probably very,very HOT.
im glad they actually showed it can play crisis....
.....now someones gonna ask "does it blend"......
John Conner diary entry:
Mar 9th 2009 at 12:42PM :
Obtained parts list for the "The Turk":
26 SAMSUNG SSD 256GB MLC
4 KINGSTON 800MHZ FBDIMM 1GB
6 1" SAS -> 4" SATA SFF-8087
6 1 MOLEX -> 4"SATA POWER
2 BLU-RAY (RW) / HD-DVD COMBO
2 COSAIR HX1000W POWER SUPPLY
2 INTEL EXTREME QX9775 QUAD CORE
2 ZALMAN COOLERS(SAWN TO FIT)
2 RADEON HD 4870 X2 GRAPHICS
1 INTEL SKULL TRAIL D5400XS MOTHERBOARD
1 ADAPTEC S SERIES RAID (8 CHANNEL STOCK SETUP)
1 ARECA 1680ix-24 RAID (BETA FIRMWARE FROM ARECA FTP)
1 THERMALTAKE ARMOUR CASE
Anyone know the name of that application used to get the HDD speed??
Wow what a dumbass he defragments an SSD....
the reason why it's so fast is because areca has got 2Gb cache onboard. even my single drive connected can do 2Gb per sec. that's because areca is caching all the data. he has to go above 2GB, like around 4GB and above to show the true speed. from what i know of areca, it's limited to 800MB/s after the 2GB cache is filled.
Agreed. There is nothing like extreme computing speed.
@ purezerg
They copied a movie from one place to another. DVDs are typically more than 4gig. It still took about a second. If you pause the movie you can see that they split the drives between the Areca (10), Adaptec (8) and Sata (6) connectors on the Mobo. They also had to remove one of the Vid cards because two were generating too much traffic and thus holding the rig back from it's true potential.
It's fast. Accept it.
That said, it is also impractical. The heat would be phenomenal, it's likely $12K in drives, AND it dosen't fit in the case. (I do give them points for the CD Rack 'hack')
I want that machine to play The Sims 2.
2 please!
That'll get you about 440 MB/s
What a good video. This is why the marketing guys make the big $$$.
And where was the marketing about?
gives me a chubby
Jizzed in my pants.
I jizzed my screen Di Novo and my pants!
I can't believe I'm on a boat!
What is jizzed?
jizzed is to jizz
When browsing Engadget I often
JIZZ IN MY PANTS
CD rack holding the SSDs lol
SHOW US BOOT UP TIME!
YES!!! I would love to see how fast that bad boy boots!
Since they used hardware RAID controllers, I guess boot up time should not be very extraordinary.
As from Reddit hey says:
_______________
The Skulltrail motherboard has a notoriously long startup time - about a minute before it'll attempt to boot to any operating system.
Once the motherboard was done initialising, it'd get to a fully usable desktop in about 5 or 6 seconds.
_______________
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit_samsung_gave_me_24_new_ssd_drives_to/c084cbo
wait..didn't WD come out with hdd at 6gb/s ? (i'll prolly get flamed for this noob question)
We're talking about 2 gigaBYTES a second, or roughly 16 gigabits a second.
Seagate's new drive has a 'little' b I think, while this one has a 'big' B.
6Gb ~ .75GB < 2 GB
Your half right, it was actually seagate that came out with it.
I don't know if WD did as well.
No flaming here, but there's a huge, huge difference between 6gb/sec and 2GB/sec. Like, orders of magnitude.
6Gb/s isn't anywhere close to 2GB/s
2GB/s / 24 = ~85MB/s... Pretty crappy speeds as per SSD standards...
@Daniel
That's not how RAID works, it doesn't scale linearly (though it scales much better with SSDs than HDDs). Awesome vid nonetheless.
*mind explodes* :O
I have that PC case! It's huge! That picture makes it look tiny!
Maybe you're just really tiny.
That's not very nice sir. I was simply commenting that this case is larger than the average PC case, and that 24 SSDs make it look a lot smaller than it seems. There was no need to insult me.
Remember that most SSDs are for notebooks, so they're 2.5" hard drive form factor, not the 3.5" you're used to seeing plugged into desktop PCs. That said, the case they used was only a mid-sized desktop Thermaltake Armor.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811133021
This raises the question; how tall are you?
Hey, I could've said that you're morbidly obese.
Some things seem bigger when you can fondle them with your own hand
EPIC WANT!!!
i'll take 2 kkthxbai
So that's the solution to running Vista at a usable speed!
lol thats awesome how he just grabs the phatty cable and shakes the drives and everything still works.
i would kill for 6TBs at this speed for editing HD
That day is coming, my friend. Yes, it is.
the bigger prolem with that is how tightly those sata cables connect xD mine like falls out with the slightest touch ;_;
I've seen cables secured for shipping by gluing them in place with hot melt glue. If it's really a problem, that might be a cheap solution.
DO WANT.
I've always secretly wished to have a pc that could run Hearts decently...
Seriously though, that was awesome.
I hear the 295 GTX can run it pretty well. It can run solitaire on high detail as well.
Solitare at WUXGA and 60fps in full color. Wow, I can't wait for the day...
Here's a ballpark cost breakdown (excluding the other hardware, power supplies, cables, etc):
250GB SATA drive (24 x) @ $530.00 each = $12,720.00
8-Channel Raid Controller Card (1 x) @ $425.00
16-Channel Raid Controller Card (1x) @ $760.00
Grand total of: $13,905.00 for a 6TB rig that does 2GB/sec of data transfer.
I think that the $1500 OCZ Z-drive is starting to sound a lot more appealing for a 1TB rig that does 0.6GB/sec, but without all the cables and mess. (http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/05/oczs-z-drive-puts-1tb-of-blazing-ssd-capacity-in-your-pcie-slot/)
Either way, crazy fast write speeds are coming down the pike, which is very exciting.
You would think that with all that hardware he would've connected at least one more monitor
dibs
I thought these drives weren't meant to be defragged? Also where did they connect the SSDs to, a RAID card?
the last frames of the video show two RAID cards, an 8 channel adaptec cotroller and a 16 channel areca.
Right. Defragging Flash memory messes with the wear-leveling. It's a real bad idea...
Not that defragging would really be necessary, or really do anything if the computer is a fresh build. Also, a lot of things they showed don't necessarily have much to do with SSDs, like Crysis in the middle of a loaded game, which won't really test your storage unless you don't have enough memory to hold all the models and textures.
o.o.... 2 gb/s........ wut raid controller are they usin >.>;;
Current cards can pull about 100MB/sec per channel over the SATA 3.00 connection, so a 16 channel RAID card probably is pushing 1.6GB/sec at peak.
A PCI express 2.0 X16 graphics card can do many GB/sec of data throughput. So I imagine that future RAID cards on these same 2.0 lanes could bring some pretty serious hard-drive read/write speeds. That's why they are starting to put the SSD memory right on a PCI card and skipping the middleman all together.
I did enjoy that video very much =)
and I DO WANT!
Man are those geeks!
THAT IS SO FREAKIN' AWESOME!!! And expensive as hell!
I'm a bit disappointed that they showed a defrag. I know it's just for purposes of illustrating read/write speed, but they're going to give people the impression that these drives need to get defragged.
Actually, evidence shows that these drives do in fact need to be defragged, although not neccessarily in the traditional sense. Files don't have to be defragmented, but not having continguous blank free space can be a problem since rewriting to a sector that's been written to before requires deleting the original data and then writing the new data and SSDs are faster when writing sequentially, so if there isn't contiguous free space and the drive has to jump all over the place it suffers a rather hefty performance penalty.
So while it's stupid to run a full traditional defrag (where you put all the pieces of an already-written file together), it does actually make sense to do a free-space defrag that'll put all the free space together and erase those blocks in advance (not sure if the latter is actually doable without wearing down the drives though).
Which is why diskeeper sells Hyperfast-it's basically a free-space defragger for SSDs, and it's actually not stupid at all to run it on SSDs.
Running an old-school defrag is pretty dumb though.
Does it blend?
Well that makes my IDE look even more ancient. Time for an upgrade methinks.
It was worth making a song for that.
This is pure awesome epicness. Or epic awesomeness. Whatever.
I wonder if Samsung asked them to return the drives once they were done with them. Would be awesome to just have a computer like that sitting around the office.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit_samsung_gave_me_24_new_ssd_drives_to/
The Red-Haired IT guy from the video actually posted this to Reddit. His comments are interesting.
DOWANTDOWANTDOWANTDOWANTDOWANT!!!
My jaw hit the floor when he ran everything in his start menu.
I'm disappointed it took 24 hours to build this rig. I've built plenty of homebrew PCs myself. Unless they ran into some showstopper issues, there's no way it should have taken that long.
You do not just put a computer like this together in an hour, you have to make sweet love to it as you do it. Although yea after 4 hours I'm sure I would have been done, they were just showing off.
Building is one thing, I imagine he had 24 packages to open or unwrap if oem, getting all the cabling right, installing it all, loading up all the programs you want to use and last but not least.....TESTING. You know, WAY more than you do when you build that home pc of yours.
Hate posts with Youtube video...blocked at work.
Fragmentation makes more of a difference on SSDs than most people think. Sure, "seek time" may be low, but guess what happens to your throughput when you start multiplying the number of I/Os needed to carry out an operation? With current SSD tech you have the choice between taking a variable but very real performance hit, or shortening your drive's life span. (Exception: If it's an Intel SSD, you don't get this choice - you're just screwed either way, apparently.)
I'll stick with spinners for performance-critical machines until solid state media becomes reasonably durable, thank you very much. How about that LMNOPRAM?
SLC?
So is this going to be in the Giveaway of the Day ?
Please
Does anyone know where to find detail benchmark results from this? Also, what kind of SSD lifespan is expected with 24 drives in a raid configuration?
Epic Success, Word
Good lord. You know, someday when SSD's do become cheap enough, I'd love to grab 2 or 3 and raid them myself. Then I wold actually allow programs into my "startup" file and let them auto-load. Not like today when it takes long enough just to boot up.
Of course Windows will find a way to slow it all down.
Using a 32GB SLC SSD on my laptop and I do have my browser and Outlook load on startup. Hardly makes a difference. In fact on Windows 7 I could click on every program in my taskbar to load and they would all load in less than 15 seconds. That is 12 apps including some that would take 30 seconds alone on a HDD like itunes, vitalbook, google earth etc.
I paid less than $300. I'm enjoying this.
I would like to see them close that case up!
And what motherboard were they using?
I've seen this video. I've also seen the one where a Samsung USA tech drops one off their 3-story building in San Jose and it boots. However. I want to see the ultimate test, and it's not "will it blend?" No, put it in a pants pocket and throw it in the washer and dryer. I've seen thumb drives survive this...like to see if an SSD is just as burly.
If I had the $10,000 I'd have done a similar thing in Jan.
https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/MySavedWishDetail.aspx?ID=6002869
What program is he using to test the transfer speed?
Can this be the next engadget recession antidote giveaway?
can engadget give this thing away, maybe to ME!
That was a really great video :D shamelessly geeky but cool in a way, at the same time!
Would have been nice to see how long it took that crysis level to load, but oh well :p
engadget recession antidote pls!
@Daniel & r3loaded
2GB/s is the limit of the PCIe x8 link that the RAID controller uses. I suspect those speeds could have been achieved with fewer drives.
Yeah agreed. This was overkill. I bet they could have done it with 12 drives.
maxishine can beat this.
defraging an SSD?
Man, i got such a chubby watching that.
but can it run crysis?
Sure, and the only people who can afford to pull this trick off are getting the bloody things from the manufacturer for free.
Why did they use cheap MLC when they should have used SLC? 6TB storage is not the point here. I would have done 24 32GB SLC for 768GB. Way more than enough to hold 10+ OSes.
where can i buy these?
6 1" SAS -> 4" SATA SFF-8087
6 1 MOLEX -> 4"SATA POWER
and did he just defrag ssd? so dumb