Four X25-E Extreme SSDs Combined In Hardware RAID

theraindog writes "Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD is easily the fastest flash drive on the market, and contrary to what one might expect, it actually delivers compelling value if you're looking at performance per dollar rather than gigabytes. That, combined with a rackmount-friendly 2.5" form factor and low power consumption make the drive particularly appealing for enterprise RAID. So just how fast are four of them in a striped array hanging off a hardware RAID controller? The Tech Report finds out, with mixed but at times staggeringly impressive results."

Comments

Re:Oh good

[spazdor]

'cause regular hard drives usually survive 5 years in an enterprise environment, yep yep.

Actually, that RAID card seems more interesting

[the_humeister]

A 1.2 GHz processor with 256 DDR2 memory? Holy crap! That's faster than my new Celeron 220! And the perennial quesion: can this thing run Linux?

Re:Actually, that RAID card seems more interesting

[default luser]

Actually, I felt that the limiting factor was probably the craptastic single-core Pentium 4 EE they used to run all these benchmarks.

What, you shove thousands of dollars worth of I/O into a system, and run it through the paces with a CPU that sucked in 2005? I'm not surprised at all that most tests showed very little improvement with the RAID.

What I want to see

[XanC]

Is 4 of these in a RAID-1, running a seek-heavy database. Nobody does this benchmark, unfortunately.

Re:Oh good

[LordKaT]

'cause SSD's don't cost $300-$500 more than their spindle counterparts, yep yep.

Re:Oh good

[poot_rootbeer]

I'll be sure to do that, and replace them every 5 years when they run out of write operations.

Winchester drives, on the other hand, use a time-honored complex system of delicate moving parts, and last virtually forever. They certainly do not start experiencing sudden failures if kept in continuous service for more than 5 years.

Re:Oh good

[ChienAndalu]

Make that 228 years.

Life expectancy 2 Million Hours Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF)

Hint: learn about "wear leveling"

Redundant Array of what?

[telchine]

This is a very expensive solution. What part of Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks don't they understand?

Re:Redundant Array of what?

[afidel]

Dude, 4 of these drives can keep up with my 110 spindle FC SAN segment for IOPS. Here's a hint, 110 drives plus SAN controllers is about two orders of magnitude more expensive than 4 SSD's and a RAID card. If you need IOPS (say for the log directory on a DB server) these drives are hard to beat. The applications may be niche, but they certainly DO exist.

Re:Oh good

[spazdor]

Your enterprise environment must not be hitting its drives very hard.

Where SSDs is in disk operations that are usually lagged out by seek times; a big unwieldy database that gets a lot of writes and no downtime, for instance, is happiest when it lives on a striped SSD array.

Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of workload which is most likely to shorten a magnetic drive's life.

Re:Oh good

[FauxPasIII]

> 'cause SSD's don't cost $300-$500 more than their spindle counterparts, yep yep.

Hint: Enterprise storage purchasing often looks at dollars/IOPS rather than dollars/GB.

Comparisons a little unfair in places

[heffrey]

It seemed a little unfair that they only used the nice hardware RAID controller with the Intel SSDs. I would have liked to see them use it with all the other disks to get a more level playing field.

Re:Oh good

[neoform]

I must be doing something wrong then. Should I put my computer in the freezer when I'm not using it or something, like, to keep it fresh longer?

Re:New acronym: RAVED?

[CompMD]

No, its got a cooler acronym, RAVEN: Redundant Array of Very Expensive Not-disks-but-some-silly-stack-of-flash-memory-chips.