Slashdot Mirror
Start-up Claims SSD Achieves 180,000 IOPS
Lucas123 writes "Three-year-old start-up Pliant Technology today announced the general availability of a new class of enterprise SAS solid state disk drives that it claims without using any cache can achieve up to 180,000 IOPS for sustained read/write rates of 500MB/sec and 320MB/sec, respectively. The company also claims an unlimited number of daily writes to its new flash drives, guaranteeing 5 years of service with no slowdown. 'Pliant's SSD controller architecture is not vastly different from those of other high-end SSD manufacturers. It has twelve independent I/O channels to interleaved single level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips from Samsung Corp. The drives are configured as RAID 0 for increased performance.'"
They're fishing for a price point? Quick, everybody make a comment to the effect that such a drive is only worth about $10...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Start-up Claims SSD Achieves 180,000 IOPS
Claims? As in no one else but the company has stated this "fact"? I wish this article waited for a review before being posted :S
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
I used pre-production versions of these. I tested them with Terabytes of test data in random write tests. They are amazing, and can saturate a 1Gb FC connection with random writes. They are very resilient. We put these in my company's demo boxes to show that our architecture can compete with EMC. Kind of cheating, but we told them that it was a special drive that enables us to show the limits of our storage management architecture in a small, 1U box, instead of just showing you the limits of physical hard drives.
We beat their 8Us of EMC hard drives by 34% with just one of these 2.5" drives, and we had bottlenecks all over the place in our small demo box. And they did the testing, not us.
The thing about these drives is that they are more expensive ($/GB) even than registered ECC DDR2/3 RAM, which obviously is going to be even faster.
What an elaborate comment.
This looks like a pretty good device. Tho i haven't heard much about them until recently I'm still pretty skeptical about their claimed lifespan - something that would be able to handle 24/7 consistent read/write for a number of years. The other thing that leaves me scratching my head is the missing DRAM cache -- I thought the need to store information then write it in buffer was kind of important especially with writing as fast as SAS is supposed to be able to transfer it. If these were hitting the shelves today i'd probably wait it out.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
And Intel's enterprise-class SSDs already offer sustained speeds of up to 250MB/s read and 170MB/s write, wouldn't read speeds of approximately 500MB/s and write speeds of over 300MB/s be expected?
in Raid 0 you are in deep deep do-do.
Most peole know that striping 2 or more disks can give a performance increase but the idea of putting business critical data in a Raid 0 config is IMHO just plain crazy.
Only worth about 10$? You're crazy, I'd pay up to 20$ for such a drive!
With all the fast SSD's I've tested I've found the controllers to be a bigger bottleneck than the SSD itself. I've seen 50% performance gains on the Intel x-25e's simply by hooking them to a second machine with a different controller. Even with the best performer (Intel ICH9) I still had the feeling that the controller might have been holding the drive back a bit. Haven't tried it with an ICH10 based board yet though so perhaps there's significant improvements there. (on further reading they claim to be using SAS, I'm not aware of any really high performance SAS chipsets, they all seem to be targeted at RAID's of traditional HDD's and so can't keep up with SSD, I'd really be interested in some details of their test).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well, I don't know the whole setup, just that it was about 10 drives (15k) SCSI (not SAS) in a RAID 5. I don't know how much cache. It was a Clarion unit. But, the customer thinks, "Wow, your little box that I've never heard of has just beaten EMC." They don't get into the technical details when they make that sort of decision.
TFA said serial-attached SCSI (SAS) was currently 6Gb/sec going on to 12 by 2012. SATA III is also 6Gbit/sec.
0.5GB/sec is 4Gbit/sec, which is under the SAS limit.
Even if it were SATA @ 3Gbit/sec that would still be quite fast.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They're using SLC NAND flash which has a lower wear than MLC NAND but that doesn't mean there is no wear at all. It looks like a nice drive anyway.
That doesn't get around the bottleneck at all. You've got the same ratio of actual bandwidth used to theoretical bandwidth possible.
A single drive with multiple SATA interfaces, acting like RAID 0, would alleviate the bottleneck.
That doesn't get around the bottleneck at all.
I get nearly 2X the speed of a single drive that is limited by SATA. Theoretically, that might not be the same thing but for all *PRACTICAL* purposes, it gets around the bottleneck just fine for me :-)
It's more the "with random writes" part that is impressive (but what size writes?).
Seems like the same massive advantage of an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) over general processors and even FPGAs that I see in video compression, a field I keep tabs on.
At one time I had wondered why a $100 camcorder could encode video in real-time, when my seemingly much more powerful desktop took hours. Answer: ASIC.
Some of you may be thinking, "Well, duh," but I am not an electrical engineer and thought it was intriguing when I first found out about ASICs.
Two problems:
1) They're bottlenecked by SAS, which, if they're using 3gbit controllers, probably won't go that much higher than ~500MB/s
2) Their cost is probably insane, if they're setting the upper bounds at $6000
By comparison, Fusion-IO claims 100,000 IOPS (not as high, but not far off) on their drives, and are about to introduce a new model for $895. They use a PCI-e 4x slot, which assuming v1.x, should give them about 10gbit/s (before overhead) to play with.
Also, Woz is their chief scientist, so bonus.
The newer version of SAS would bump up the interface to 6gbit, but then, PCI-e 2.0 would bump a 4x slot up to 20gbit/s.
In short, it seems to me that the future of super high performance drives is in PCI-e rather than SAS.
Actually if you RTFA they are using the recently released 6Gb SAS spec.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You are using comparing HDD's in a Clariion to your SSD's. Not a very fair comparison. Why not compare your box to a Symmetrix V-Max with SSD's, or even a DMX with SSD's. What you've done is like sticking a Ferrari engine into a Lada and compared it to say a Ford Focus and saying that your's wins. Just because your engine is faster doesn't mean your product is better.
All this talk of RAID is nonsense and doesn't apply to these drives. RAID stands for "Redundant Array of *Inexpensive* Disks". These SSD are probably bloody expensive.
Yep, doubling your bus count usually doubles your transfer speed. *rolling eyes*