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Intel Takes SATA Performance Crown With X25-E SSD
theraindog writes "We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors off the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s, and offers ten times the lifespan of its predecessor, all while retaining Intel's wicked-fast storage controller and crafty Native Command Queuing support. The Extreme isn't cheap, of course, but The Tech Report's in-depth review of the drive suggests that if you consider its cost in terms of performance, the X25-E actually represents good value for demanding multi-user environments."
This just screams dedicated database storage.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Considering I have a couple of HP DL380 G5s with 2.5" 72GB 15K SAS drives, each set me back about $600 (after education discount) ... the cost of this drive $738.84 with a truckload of performance to boot is a heck of a deal.
Is it just me or have we gone full-frontal-funnyfarm with the analogies and adjectives here?
meep
blow the doors of the competition
Well, that's should win over the male population....
Seems to me the *target* for this drive would be the same buyer as 15k sas/scsi drives. Those are suspiciously absent from the tests...
I suck at spelling and grammar, but when I read the Slashdot headlines I realize that I'm not as bad as some people! I'm just trying to figure out how they got jobs as editors.
My first thought is builds. I have to do Windows CE 5.0 builds all the time and they're almost entirely I/O bound. I've also compiled Xfree86 before at another job. It seems like the really large compiles are mostly I/O bound. The CPU doesn't peg, but the hard drive light stays lit.
Something like this would be fantastic for development. I really want one.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I still think the biggest deterrent is lifetime. I want to buy an Aspire One, but I'm pretty disappointed at some of the things that I'll have to do with the SSD. No swapping, no journaling, no logging or timestamps. Sounds like it's still a step backwards to me. Still needs a little more time.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
This costs $22/GB, and has a write speed of 170 MB/s. A 2GB stick of DDR2-800 costs $12-$20/GB, and has a speed of 6400MB/s. So we have a case where slow storage actually costs more than much faster (but less permanent) storage. I wonder how much a couple extra batteries would cost...
It's "blow the doors off". It doesn't blow your competition's doors,
Let's see...$720 for 32GB ($22/GB) versus $278 for 256GB ($1/GB.)
Keep in mind that you could buy two of those 256GB drives, mirror them, and exceed (in all likelihood) the performance of the Intel drive, and have eight times as much storage. Since reliability is pretty unproven, having them in a mirror means your ass is suitably covered.
The absolute lowest storage density (SAS doesn't come in anything less than 36GB, and 300GB is the top-end) at $22/GB, when $4/GB is the norm for SAS drives (that's a premium of 5.5x) is a big ol' cup of Fail.
Please help metamoderate.
OK, someone explain something. How does NCQ work on a SSD drive? It isn't spinning, so what's the point?
NCQ to my understanding was stolen from SCSI and thrown onto SATA drives.
So, the data on the drive is in the order "2 3 1 4" and you request it in "1 2 3 4" w/o NCQ it would take 4 revolutions to pick up all 4 requests. With NCQ it would take 1 revolution as it would pick up the data as it was in the drive.
PC-6400 ram is around 15 dollars a GB now, and the 6400 stands for MB/sec, i.e. ram is over 20x faster than this flash drive and has no write wear issues or slowness of random writing. The only thing wrong with it is volatility, but in an enterprise environment you can use a UPS and/or maintain a serial update log on a fast hard disk or RAID (since the log is serial, the flash drive's ultrafast seek advantage doesn't apply). There is just a narrow window where this $21/gb 32gb flash drive is really cost effective.
What happens when the read-write cycles on this run out?
I would have liked to have seen them test this drive in a much more powerful system. I mean, a P4 with 1GB RAM, and a fairly dated chipset (955x) as the SATA controller? No one is going to put a drive like this in a system that old. I'd guess that we might see different results on a more powerful system. At some point in those tests, other components of this fairly slow (by today's standards) machine. Throw some serious power behind it, and you can be sure that you're not bottlenecked, and the full power of the drive shows. Can't say for sure if this is actually the case, as I don't have a drive to test, but it's a definite possibility. Hopefully someone else does a similar review with a more powerful testbed.
Why the heck does a drive that has uniform, low latency random access would even NEED NCQ? NCQ was designed to optimize the seek order in mechanical drives with heads.
And neither one is as reliable or has the IOPS of three standard SATA drives that cost 50% of the price for 10x the storage.
Math. It's a wonderful thing. Use it with your salesman.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And that's where the bottlneck is if I remember.. I mean you guys just reported it a little bit earlier
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/11/24/1941236.shtml
Ooh, now that could be a dealmaker in the server room. With RAID-5 reaching its limits for magnetic media, a rack of these could be a viable replacement.
Of course a server room has different priorities to the average gamer:
1. Reliability
2. Reliability
3. Capacity
4. Price
5. Speed
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Meh, still not even half as fast as the Fusion IO-Drive. Of course, those cost $3,000+ and run solely on a PCIe 4x ...
I guess there's worse things it could blow than doors
"Sweet zombie jesus! Get the Bloating Department on this, stat! We need Windows Seven to piss all this performance away just running the wallpaper!"
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Allright the price, well, that's to be expected. But the performance rocks! Just ... itty, bitty rocks.
32Gig? 32Gig?!? Come on, there is probably have more than 32Gig on this drive just in Vista system restore points.
I believe you meant to say, ``blow the doors off the competition,'' but let's just say the "cost" of those drives ``blows chunks.''
I hear the US Government knows how to piss money down the drain. I'm bettin' they think this price/Gb is just f'n dreamy!
It's the late 60s and a groupie is invited backstage after a particularly mega concert featuring all the great bands of the day. After a while, a bit of pot has been smoked, some tabs dropped, and plenty of booze swigged, and so things start to swing. The groupie first goes down on Ray Manzarek, then Jim Morrison, and finally Rob Krieger and John Densmore get theirs. Groupie's not done though, and is just getting started on Jimi Hendrix when Michael Caine bursts in, and shouts...
"Oi! You're only supposed to blow the bloody Doors off!"
The earlier model of Intel SSD had some serious performance degradation after a few hours of heavy use. (Article in French, but it says that after a ten minute torture with IOmeter writing small blocks to the drive, and even after waiting an hour for the drive to 'recover', performance drops by about 70%.) I wonder if they have fixed this bug with the new model?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors of the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s
Yet, 5 articles down the Slashdot homepage, options depending:
Samsung said it's now mass producing a 256GB solid state disk that it says has sequential read/write rates of 220MB/sec and 200/MBsec, respectively.
I'm pretty sure the improved write speeds is the part that people are interested in with SSDs these days.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
From the techreport article :
Is it time to look at connecting these chips direct to the motherboard ? Avoiding the added complexity of driving what is essentially a block of memory via a serial interface designed to control spinning discs. If the SLC memory chips were mapped into the main memory address space, it should be possible to make them look like a 32G or 64G (NV)RAM drive on a Unix/Linux system. Mount '/' and '/boot' on the (NV)RAM drive and install the OS on it. Presto - very fast boot and load times. You can still use traditional spinning disc(s) for large data, mounted as separate data partitions.
It would need some thought as to which parts of the filesystem went on spinning disc and which parts went on the (NV)RAM partition. But that is why Unix/Linux has all of the tools for mounting different parts of the filesystem on different partitions. Back in the olden days, most systems had a combination of small fast(ish) discs and big(ish) slow discs, and tweaking fstab to mount different parts of the filesystem on different discs was a standard part of the install process. Most desktop systems now have one huge disc, and the standard Linux install dumps everything on one big '/' partition, but all the tools for optimizing the partition layout are still there.
How about an ultra quiet desktop workstation with no moving parts, the OS installed on (NV)RAM disc, and user data dragged across the network from a fileserver (e.g NFS mounted /home).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ZFS in recent Solaris Nevada and FreeBSD CURRENT supports a feature called L2ARC; Level-2 Advanced Replacement Cache. This is basically the ZFS filesystem/metadata cache, backed by so-called cache devices.
So, you can get your 32GB SSD, shove it in front of your n-TB ZFS array, and it'll use it to help accelerate random reads. 32GB of storage is a bit feeble, but 32GB of cache.. that's rather compelling, especially if your storage is otherwise backed by cheap and cheerful 7200RPM disks.
The Fusion IOdrive is faster...about 510 Mb/s according to dvnation. At $30/GB, that's not bad. Granted, the Intel one is $22/GB...but it has about twice the performance; and it's only priced about 1.4x the price of the Intel ssd.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Hmm odd that seemed to have missed out on the leading enterprise SSDs. I think Tom's Hardware reviewed them a while back. Samsung SSDs from what I remember were as cost effective as they get but generally were slower than either Memoright or Mitron?
I guess we'll agree to disagree. I'd submit that anything an administrator can automate (eg: all email older than 90 days will be rolled over to an archive system with a lower SLA) should be automated. Anything a computer can do instead of a user should be done by the computer.
If I'm an accountant, the whole reason I use a computer is so there is no pile of bills and invoices on my desk. If, when I'm done working on a client's books, the computer knows where to tuck them away for me automatically, then that's good system design.
"This just screams dedicated database storage." - by Enderandrew (866215) on Monday November 24, @10:25PM (#25881127) Homepage
You're NOT kidding... proof?
SSD use performance gains, quantified, here, for:
1.) Database Servers
2.) WebServers
3.) FileServers
ALL - Per this review/test (for your reference):
----
Gigabyte's i-RAM storage device - RAM disk without the fuss:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7 [techreport.com]
----
That's PRACTICALLY applicable uses for them, on an INDUSTRIAL scale, no less... HUGE orders of magnitude of diff.!
In fact?
This was their conclusion, verbatim, from that test:
----
"Wow. Seriously. The i-RAM is in another league in IOMeter, offering transaction rates that are an order of magnitude higher than its closest competition. It doesn't take long for the i-RAM to get revved up, either. The card hits its peak transaction rate with just two simultaneous I/O requests."
----
& they're right...
Fact is? Well - I used the SAME techniques (albeit via a software based mirroring back to HDD ramdrive by EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com) back in 1996 to good review in Windows NT magazine (now Windows IT Pro), & later, @ MS-Tech-Ed 2000-2002 placing as a FINALIST there, 2 yrs. straight, in the HARDEST CATEGORY:
SQLServer Performance Enhancement
By using SSD's &/or Ramdisks in Software for perf. gains & it worked... & later, I was also the #1 featured review @ CENATEK.COM, in regards to applying physical SSD ramdrives the same way... it works!
APK
P.S.=> I use one, @ home no less (older, slightly SLOWER model, same idea though (PC-133 SDRAM + PCI 2.2 bus @ 133mb/sec., in the CENATEK "RocketDrive") vs. (DDR-RAM + SATA I bus @ 150mb/sec. in the GIGABYTE IRAM - both of which maintain nearly even/level read-write speeds, due to NOT being FLASH RAM based mind you), albeit for things like:
----
A.) Pagefile.sys placement (partition #1 here, @ 1gb)
B.) WebBrowser caches (partition #2, 1gb)
C.) %Temp% ops (partition #2, 1gb)
D.) Logging from the OS (like eventlogs), & apps too
----
The ideas I note have been "modded up" here on this website before, here (recently too):
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1014349&cid=25591403 [slashdot.org]
They're ideas "normal folks" can use, to gain extra performance @ home even, via SSD use... apk
Saying the i-RAM is in a league of its own is no longer accurate. The X25-E is directly comparable to the i-RAM.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15931/9
The i-RAM is only twice as fast as the new flash based drive. That a storage device is anywhere close to ram in speed is a huge advance in the industry.
As for even read/write speeds, and other old flash drive problems, the new Intel drives are very well designed and do not have the same type of issues.
Correct.
I remember that one, because I saw your debate with symbolset in regards to Master Boot Record trojans, and your mentioning FIXMBR from the Recovery Console to stop it (and only it, to which he accused you of stating it fixed everything, and he missed the fact you stated it did not, for other things that might arise due to rootkits).
You also noted that you had been in Windows it pro magazine for ramdrives and their uses, as well as microsoft tech ed 2 years consecutively.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1015483&cid=25634047
apk: "Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro Sept./Oct. 1996), for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache I/II program (a logical block diskcache operating @ the DISK DRIVER level) program increasing its effectiveness by up to 40%) albeit, for their SuperDisk (mirroring back to backing HDD ramdrive program) this time & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row iirc."
I thought it was impressive enough. Even symbolset called you smart.
symbolset also called you names though, and I felt it was funny when you asked he if he had done anything remotely near the same as you had years ago no less.
He also called you crazy, and it was funnier still when you asked symbolset if he had his phd in psychiatry too.
symbolset likes to toss names at others who prove him incorrect on many things and also in regards to his inability to show he had ever done anything of worth that others in publications in the science of computing said was good, as you had done a number of times if I recall correctly.
symbolset has to try to be the bmoc here, because he has nothing to his credit of worth in this science that others have noticed in publications.
symbolset calls others names that exposed him for skimming posts and his making mistakes, like a child might.
Consider symbolset as a source, and let him be. symbolset is not worth your time. symbolset is a nobody that calls others names like a frustrated child would when he is found incorrect, guilty of skimming, or just losing a debate to others. I know because he has done so to myself also.
CO$TS my man, costs... you're forgetting THAT.
GIGABYTE IRAM = $125, + cost of 4gb DDR (max, can take less, 1-4gb depending on YOUR needs) = total of maybe, $225 or so...
vs.
$3,000 for say a FUSION Flash-based SSD (a very fast Flash-RAM based SSD), or, this $600 per LOTS OF 1,000 purchased blocks (which translates out to a LOT more than $600, per board)
Also? With Flash-based SSD's, there IS a question of LONGEVITY...
E.G.-> I've had a CENATEK "RocketDrive" here, running STRONG for nearly 8 yrs. now... will a FLASH-based SSD last THAT long??
APK
P.S.=> By the way: Here, on THIS site today?
IBM &/or Sandisk (samsung maybe), have broken 170mb/sec. & 200mb/sec. respectively (iirc may be other way around) on WRITES on their FLASH BASED SSD's, with more capacity than the 16gb limit the IRAM has...
HOWEVER/Again:
@ WHAT COST by way of comparison to the IRAM & also will they endure as long?
See, for the way I note I use mine (webpage caches, %temp% ops, & logging on 1gb partition #1, & pagefile.sys placement on 1gb partition #2?)
All ops I use an SSD for, are ALL read/write I-O, & anyone, even a home end user can use them, this way... (& you do NOT need an 80gb sized SSD for that!)... apk
SAS is Serial Attached SCSI. The acronym alone destroys your clueless post:
1) Serial - Uses SATA cables and signaling, so 300MB/sec is the max anyway
2) Attached - no problems here..
3) SCSI adds 1 about 1ms of latency due to processing in the host bus
adapter and the device.
Moving on, SAS adapters cost more. Whereas SATA is free with most modern motherboards.
Further, SAS controllers can make full use of SATA drives.
So, no higher peak speed, more overhead, higher cost.
Any other stupid questions?
Here is the specific page of TFA about the objects under discussion. 0.62W at idle.
Now about full out... I don't have a citation but if you get more than 1.4, let me know. That would be... interesting.
On the upside for SAS, these SATA drives plug right into your SAS array, so they've got that going for them. They don't make a SAS version of this drive yet but SAS controllers are compatible with SATA drives (although the reverse is not true). But of course you knew that. Yes, I know an SSD is technically not a "drive". If that's where you were headed don't bother. It would be tedious and pedantic.
Help stamp out iliturcy.