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Colossus 3.5-in SSD Combines Quad Controllers
Vigile writes "The new Colossus SSD comes in capacities starting at 256GB and going all the way up to 1TB in a standard 3.5-in hard drive form factor. This larger size was required because the drive actually integrates not one but four Indilinx SSD controllers and three total RAID controllers in a nested RAID-0 array. All of this goodness combines to create an incredibly fast drive that beats most other options in terms of write speeds and is competitive in read tests as well. Using some custom 'garbage collection' firmware, the drive works around the fact that TRIM commands aren't supported in RAID configurations to maintain high speeds through the life of the SSD."
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Really, if you want to spend that kind of money, put it on a card. It would be much faster on the PCI buss that SATA for a negligible incremental cost.
128 GB $549.99
256 GB $1,014.99
512 GB $1,599.99
1024 GB $3,315.99
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of storage in this country. The Intel X-25 was the SSD to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-controller drive. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the X-25E. That's three controllers and an extra port. For USB. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four controllers. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three controllers and a cache. USB or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five controllers.
I thought it was pretty clear that what matters for most desktop users is the random small write speed. See, for example, Anandtech's SSD anthology and later followups.
So, where are the 4 KiB random write benchmarks? They are conspicuously absent from this review. We can see the effect, I think, in the IOMeter results -- the X-25M outperforms the OCZ drive across the board on those, despite the OCZ win in the throughput tests. But, personally, I'd like to see the raw numbers on 4 KiB random writes. Have this many reviewers really learned so little about benchmarking SSDs since they came out?
People think all SSDs are the same. They aren't. Consumer SSDs are typically MLC and have a failure rate far above "enterprise" SSDs which are SLC. I wish you could buy consumer SLC SSDs
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This kludgey design is a bad idea for several reasons :
1. Despite throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, those indilinx chips are still much slower than Intel's controller at small, random reads and writes.
2. Since the drive needs four indilinx controllers rather than 1, some complex packaging, AND 3 RAID controllers it's going to cost a lot more per gigabyte. It's probably also more failure prone. And the MSRPs bear that out : this is a lot more expensive than the MSRPs for the equivalent Intel product.
3. Doesn't support native TRIM support
4. Biggest problem of all : the drive is bandwidth starved because it's on the SATA bus rather than on the PCI express bus. Furthermore, those slow internal RAID chips don't help matters. So instead of supporting sequential reads at 600 megabytes/second, it's capped at about 240. Lame.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636&Subcategory=636&srchInDesc=slc
It comes with a Collosus of a price tag :)
I'm waiting for the Guardian model.
The Colossus has only 2 Indilinx controllers. It's the Colossus Cascade that has 4 (along with an even higher price).
and the companies ( Hello, Samsung!) should be ashamed. It wasn't until a few years ago that MLC was commercially viable but it only increases
by a factor of TWO. That's one of the lowest, most pointless tradeoffs ever in recent computing.
So, I get merely TWICE the storage for a TEN TIMES reduction in average component life, a 40% reduction in write speed, without fancy controller
redesign, and we get to enjoy all the ludicrous "benefits" of MLC for the price that SLC would have been anyway, through market forces and silicon die shrink
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
But is it faster than the 5000 char per second / 30 mile an hour tape I have on MY Colossus Mk 1?
[http://www.bletchleypark.org]
I'm just speculating, but wouldn't it be MUCH faster to rip out the 2 internal drives and RAID those using your mobo or software? 2x SATAII vs 1xSATAII seems pretty obvious.
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Review/
HDD is cheap storage nowadays, but SSD with ist speed is great for putting programs on it. You rarely need more than 16 Gb for your installed software. /var /tmp and such on HDD to avoid writes) and got my 25-seconds boot. And by that I mean complete system start with KDE4 and several apps like kopete, kbluetooth, knetworkmanager, klipper, korganizer + some plasmoids on desktop. Prior to SSD is was more like 55 seconds to 1:10. Startup time of heavy programs like Openoffice, GIMP or games has greatly improved as well. And there is room for improvement -- sata link for that chipset is too slow and takes about 8 seconds to start. I hope that this can be corrected in driver (it's a staging driver in the kernel).
Recently, I have bought a Verbatim SSD 16Gb Expresscard for my laptop, made it EXT2 and copied my software on it (left
It would be ideal to have small, fast and ultra cheap SSD drives I can put in to accelerate my family member's desktops (won't probably happen, because they still have IDE drives, not SATA). USB is simply too slow for that task.
A dual-disk notebook or desktop config with programs on smaller SSD and HDD for user data would to the trick for most users. Otherwise it's hard to notice the benefits of an upgrade to a faster CPU or more RAM.
Why shouldn’t TRIM be supported in RAID configurations? That is just lack of implementation.
http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7615
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I personally think SATA is done. We need a new physical HD transport layer for this.
You're right, 3 gig SATA isn't as fast as 6 gig SAS, 8 gig FC, or 10 gig iSCSI/FCoE?
Seems like 3 bits per cell will make for some interesting block allocation algorithms. :)
SPAM - GARBAGE ALERT!!!!
Why did not they not test a RAID with an Intel and OCZ drive with different controllers so you can actually compare if buying this $3000 SSD is better than buying $3000 normal SSDs and creating your own RAID array? Perhaps the garbage collection issue? Still it would be good to see.