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

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: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.

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.

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?