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OCZ IBIS Introduces High Speed Data Link SSDs
Vigile writes "New solid state drives are released all the time, and the performance improvements on them have started to stagnate as the limits of the SATA 3.0 Gb/s are reached. SATA 6G drives are still coming out and some newer PCI Express based drives are also available for those users with a higher budget. OCZ is taking it another step with a new storage interface called High Speed Data Link (HSDL) that extends the PCI Express bus via mini-SAS cables and removes the bottleneck of SATA-based RAID controllers thus increasing theoretical performance and allowing the use of command queueing — vital to high IO's in a RAID configuration. PC Perspective has a full performance review that details the speed and IO improvements and while initial versions will be available at up to 960 GB (and a $2800 price tag), in reality, the cost-per-GB is competitive with other high-end SSDs when you get to the 240GB and above options"
Thanks to the high speed link SSDs.
From the website: 'Whatever you do, don't plug an HSDL device into a SAS RAID card (or vice versa)! '
Although I dislike proprietary connectors for generic signals, I dislike interchangeable connectors for different signals even more. Can someone with a bit more knowledge explain why this could ever be a good idea, or how this is not going to smoke hardware.
The connectors shown in the article look very similar to multilane connectors that you see used on raid controllers like a 3ware raid controller. Is it the same?
Wow, what a clueless post. SATA-150 can't sustain more than 150MB/s and there's many SSDs that go beyond that. The fastest Crucial even goes beyond SATA 3 Gbps on sustained reads. Working for a HDD manufacturer or something?
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How is this any different than existing PCI Express SSD products? They both consume a PCI Express slot..and this one consumes a 3.5" drive slot. Am I the only one missing the point?
What about the ioDrive? They have to use PCIe because SATA isnt fast enough.
I think you're wrong. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
Looking at the avg. read speed (page 4) would say that they are going faster than sata150 in most cases. (Assuming sata150 is about 150MB/s)
The fastest of the cabled SSD are topping off around 250MB/s. The one speeding on is a PCI-Express card(ioDrive 160) which seems to be running around 620MB/s average read.
The illustrations all seem to show an x8 card, but I think what they're saying is they multiplex a PCIe lane over each pair in the SFF-8087 cable. So, eventually you'll be able to run x16 out of a card to your drive bay, and use that now for a 4x4 config, but perhaps a single x16 config in the future.
In short, a slower PCIe extension cord using existing cables (as opposed to the oddball PCIe external cables). This will probably put pressure on mobo vendors to add more x16 slots. I regularly build storage servers with 16 and 24 drive bays, and it looks like top-end now are Tyan AMD boards with 4 x16 slots. I'd like to see, for instance, a SuperMicro with 6 PCIe x16 slots and dual Intel sockets (though I'm using AMD 12-core more and more lately). PCIe 3.0 is due out in a couple months, so probably it will be there - OCZ could also update to the faster coding rate.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In the lab, maybe.
Show me one that does it in the real world.
I own a few of them, they aren't that fast, the bus isn't the issue, regardless of what you've read on some website.
Not that spinning platters are faster, but the bus has been faster than the disks for ages and will continue to do so for ages unless something major changes which isn't likely considering the drives have to use electrical signalling just like the bus does.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How about the drives in this review?
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1007&type=expert&pid=4
Looks to me like one of them is breaking 600MB/sec which is faster than even SATA-3 can handle.
None of this is to mention access time/overhead which is another reason to go to PCIe directly. Rather than doing PCIe -> SATA -> drive's controller, cut out the middle man. I'm not saying it is the best idea in all cases, but it seems to work when performance needs to be the absolute highest.
I have a pair of two-year-old cheapo SSDs in RAID0, and they're stuck at the limits of my SATA bus. I can easily imagine there being a single drive that will outpace the SATA bus.
Why not just go SAS?
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Same physical connector with different electrical wiring. Now we can fry all those expensive SAS parts. Yay! I don't see this taking off. The storage industry is moving to SAS 6Gb/s now.
none
that it's just relocating the SATA controller chip to the drive bay?
Wonder why this performs similar to the RevoDrive, which is a SATA-based solution? As the article says, it's a RevoDrive on a stick.
I know that SSDs can saturate 3Gb cable. That is why we are working on 6Gb, as well as SSDs now.
Still while spinning media is so much cheaper we don't see it going away.
There is a whole cluster of consumer drives today pushing ~275MB/s out of sata 3gb's 300MB/s limit. That's safely within the range of 'sata limited' allowing for a very small amount of controller overhead.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Are you sure it is the bus and not the SATA controller itself. I mean sata is(Should be with a good controller) 3gbit per port. Not a total of 3gbit per controller.
1. For NCQ to work with SATA, all that's needed is 1) AHCI and 2) an OS that has a storage interface framework that support command queueing. Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris (as well as OpenSolaris) support this, and I'm almost certain native AHCI drivers (including the ones from Microsoft, Intel, Silicon Image, etc.) provide this as well.
2. NCQ supports up to 31 command queues... which just so happens to be the maximum queue depth of HSDL as well (oh sorry, maybe 32, we don't know for certain). Wow, imagine that. Anandtech's rant about the command queueing capability is silly. Did they even consider testing TCQ (used on SAS)? How much did they get paid for this?
3. I love how this OCZ-hyped HSDL crap uses a mini-SAS connector, but if you plug a HSDL device into a mini-SAS port the port (and controller) will almost certainly smoke (I'd need an engineering PDF for this HSDL crap to verify, but it's fairly safe to assume it will). Way to penny-pinch and do absolutely nothing but confuse your customers. Maybe you should reapply your R&D focus on improving your existing products that are buggy as hell (see OCZ forums for proof) and stop catering to the gamer demographic (continue to see forums).
Storage and technology-wise, this is the equivalent of putting (more?) blue LEDs on a DIMM. The only thing this tries to solve is the SATA300 and SATA600 bandwidth barrier, which isn't a barrier with SAS multipathing (not the same as SATA port multipliers).
My single (older) Intel SSD will saturate a SATA channel, and come fairly close to saturating a SATA-2 channel. I know there are SSD's out there that are 2-3 times as fast as mine.
I've heard that the almighty Apple and a little start-up company named "intel" (what a stupid name) are working on something called LightPeak that will have enough bandwidth for everything!
Just remember, 3Gb/s converts to 375MB/s, so maxing it out really isn't too bad. The current Crucial RealSSD 300C tops out at 350 MB/s. That's an MLC drive; an SLC drive has the potential to be double that speed. By the time you get past the SATA overhead, you're definitely maxing out the bus with that drive on a SATA1 connection.
Inside the IBIS there is two full SATA drive boards, with SandForce SATA controllers, connected to a standard PCIe/SATA RAID controller on the base board.
The only difference to a SATA RAID controller and two regular SSDs is that the cable is in a different place.
There is a whole cluster of consumer drives today pushing ~275MB/s out of sata 3gb's 300MB/s limit. That's safely within the range of 'sata limited' allowing for a very small amount of controller overhead.
Though it's highly questionable as to whether to is any sort of meaningful "limit" in real-world usage.
how much Monster would charge for these cables
...I can't count that high.
The fastest SSDs that you can buy can do 1400MB(bytes)/sec write and 1500MB/sec reads.
Many new SDDs, even cheap ones, will be doing ~220-280MB/sec reads and ~180-200MB/sec writes. And I do mean cheap ones. The new 22nm drives will come out before the end of the year.
It's a limit for me, but admittedly, I'm a software developer, so my usage is a bit different from the conventional. But I bet anyone who does video editing would love to stream data at that rate.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...I couldn't take looking at any more artifacted jpeg images after page 5, which it seems was only 1/10 of the way through... Sheesh...
You sure done fucked that one up, Sparky. The SATA 6Gb/s works out at about 768MB/s, which while decent, isn't good enough for many different uses. SATA 1.5Gb/s is only just over 140MB/s, something easily surpassed these days.
I wonder how you know your SATA setup isn't at fault?
But those are not SATA, as far as I know. They are PCIe SSDs, which is essentially what you're building with the IBIS solution. Rather than packaging both together on a board, you're separating the actual storage from the PCIe "controller" and sending the signaling over a cable.
Given the choice between the two, I'll opt for the solution that lets me get a controller with the number of ports I want. This opens up the possiblity of doing RAID, as in their 4 ports/4 drives solution. It may seem silly to do that instead of just buying the appropriately-sized single drive solution or PCIe SSD, but it would also be nice to have the ability to swap just the drive as capacities increase.
Long signatures suck.
WHY DO THEY COST A KIDNEY PER TERABYTE???
Actually, that is a pretty good deal...
It's a limit for me, but admittedly, I'm a software developer, so my usage is a bit different from the conventional.
How, though ? What are you doing where a single drive maxing out at ~300MB/sec actually impacts your productivity ?
Yes great point. With this system you can grow. No stranded 1st gen pcie card, that wont work with 'the next version' of the same brand of card in the slot next to it.
With this you just keep on pushing in as many SSD's as you need.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Compiling, deploying, starting complex server software. Several minutes, twenty or thirty times a day. Almost purely disk bound.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Compiling, deploying, starting complex server software. Several minutes, twenty or thirty times a day. Almost purely disk bound.
Almost certainly by IOPS, though, not bandwidth.
Mostly read bound, particularly in the server startup. Lots of large resources to be read and processed.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking