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"

Comments

first!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to the high speed link SSDs.

Bad hardware design.

[GiveBenADollar]

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.

Re:Bad hardware design.

[Relyx]

From what I gather it was cheaper and quicker for OCZ to co-opt an existing physical standard than roll their own. All the customer needs to do is source good quality SAS cables, which are in plentiful supply.

Re:sata (the channel) is NOT the issue

[Kjella]

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?

Re:Familiar connectors

[Joehonkie]

Those are just very high-end SAS cables, so yes.

Re:sata (the channel) is NOT the issue

[Emetophobe]

there isn't a drive in consumerland (spinning or otherwiwse) that can use a full sata channel on its own.

What about the ioDrive? They have to use PCIe because SATA isnt fast enough.

(even sata150 is faster than ssd's are, sustained).

I think you're wrong. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

As of April 2010 mechanical hard disk drives can transfer data at up to 157 MB/s, which is beyond the capabilities of the older PATA/133 specification and also exceeds a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s link. High-performance flash drives can transfer data at up to 308 MB/s which exceeds a SATA 3 Gbit/s link.

One PCIe x4 per SFF-8087, I think

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Different...how?

[Joehonkie]

Probably. The point is that it's a whole new drive interconnect. They have another product that is a standalone card which supports 4 drives in a RAID. These drives only come with a card because it's a new interface technology and they are assuming you won't have a port for it yet. It's an open standard so they are gambling on it eventually becoming the standard for SSDs and having it built into motherboards and such.

Re:Familiar connectors

[suso]

If these are your idea of very high-end SAS cables/connectors, then you haven't met my friend Mr. $1million SAN.

Ok

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Serial-Attached SCSI

[leandrod]

Why not just go SAS?

Re:Serial-Attached SCSI

[dmesg0]

My question exactly. One miniSAS connector would give them 6Gb*4 = 24Gbps = ~2400GB/s (including overhead) - a lot more than enough bandwidth

Maybe to save the costs of SAS HBA (at least 200-300$) and avoid paying royalties to T10?

Re:Serial-Attached SCSI

[Surt]

Are you joking? Because the bandwidth has the same limitations this company (and all the other ssd makers) are trying to find a way to break free of.

Re:Serial-Attached SCSI

[Wesley Felter]

Maybe to save the costs of SAS HBA (at least 200-300$)

That's the reason. OCZ found some really cheap obsolete Silicon Image PCI-X RAID controllers and PCIe-to-PCI-X bridge chips in a warehouse somewhere and decided to kludge together some "SSDs".

Another Betamax ?

[gtirloni]

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.

Re:Another Betamax ?

[dave420]

Most people don't have SAS in their machines. And even if they did, 6Gb/s isn't enough for a lot of people.

Re:Familiar connectors

[elfprince13]

Is that the Monster Cable version?

Re:sata (the channel) is NOT the issue

[Surt]

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.

Re:sata (the channel) is NOT the issue

[dave420]

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?