OCZ Couples SSD, Mechanical Storage On a PCIe Card

J. Dzhugashvili writes "We've seen some solid-state drives on PCI Express cards before, but OCZ's RevoDrive Hybrid may very well be the first solution to combine solid-state storage and a mechanical hard drive on a single PCI Express x4 card. Using Dataplex caching software from Nvelo, the RevoDrive Hybrid uses its solid-state component (a RAID 0 array of SandForce-based SSDs) as a cache for an onboard mechanical hard drive. The caching scheme is reportedly so effective that "a 5,400-RPM drive can be used without sacrificing much performance," according to The Tech Report's coverage. OCZ hasn't hashed out all of the details yet, but it expects the RevoDrive Hybrid to start at $350 this July. The base configuration should couple 60GB of solid-state storage with a 500GB mechanical drive."

Comments

Reminds me of hardcards

[yuhong]

Do anyone remember the old ISA hardcards?

Re:Reminds me of hardcards

[adolf]

Do anyone remember the old ISA hardcards?

Yes. They were made by Quantum, and later by some other manufacturers.

It kind of made sense at the time, since hard drives were non-trivial to install back then. I still remember performing a series of dark incantations in MS-DOS debug to initialize an MFM hard drive on an XT.

At the time, I thought it was pretty cool, getting my fingers dirty like that. But I think most folks would have preferred to die in a fire than get involved in their hardware to that extent.

And at the same time, I felt it was a lousy idea to integrate everything since it also increased the number of single points of failure in the storage system. (This so-far vapor offering from OCZ suffers the same problem.)

Another issue with the OCZ product: What problem does it actually solve which cannot also be solved by a good OS, a competent admin, an SSD, and a spinning disk?

I feel spoiled, these days, when I pull the side off of my desktop, plug in a new SATA drive, and it just works -- immediately, without even turning the box off first.

(I also remember 8-bit memory expansion cards populated with six dozen individual DIP RAM chips. I remember soldering pins onto SIMM memory to make them fit into my SIPP motherboard. And I remember caching hard drive controllers, stuffed with as much RAM as you could afford. And I remember hardware data compression cards of at least two general variations. I remember the And I remember when sound cards actually did something, and themselves had SIMM sockets. And I remember squeezing sixteen 30-pin SIMMs into four 72-pin sockets on a Socket 5 board.

I even remember an 8-bit ISA card, called the Copy II PC Option Board, which existed only to facilitate copying software on floppy. I even found a Gopher source for the reference just to show how full my beard is, and how long I've been in Mom's basement.

Now, get off of my lawn before I start lamenting about how under-appreciated a common 8-bit parallel port is.)

Re:Reminds me of hardcards

[hairyfeet]

But how long does it ACTUALLY last. I'm not talking those MTBF numbers that the manufacturers pull out their butt, but some cold hard "lets see how long it'll go" kind of in the trenches numbers.

Because from what I've seen while SSDs may be satanically fast they also seem to die pretty damned quick. Even Jeff Atwood at coding horror has posted you need to use a "Hot/Crazy scale" for SSD, as in how much money and data/downtime are you willing to risk for the crazy speeds.

Frankly between all the horror stories and watching my two gamer customer blow several hundred on drives that barely lasted them two years I've been telling my customers unless there is a specific reason for needing SSD, such as mobile devices that are gonna get slung around a lot, not to bother with the SSDs at this time. Frankly the HDD tech has gotten so good that often I'm pulling perfectly working drives as people upgrade for increased space long before they kill the drive, hell I have a drawer full from 20Gb on up to 200Gb, all working perfectly.

Also if the article I linked to and the gamers I worked for are any indication SSDs don't "fail gracefully" or give you plenty of advanced warning like HDDs do. With every HDD I've had fail short of being dropped there was plenty of time to get the data off as SMART gave warning long before the point of no return. With both of the gamers it was "flip the switch and its gone" no warning at all.

So does anybody out there have some real world experience and not just the MTBF numbers? I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here at /. that have pounded the hell out of SSD looking for boosted performance, how did they hold up? Are they still running? If not did you get warning before they died? Because if the drive can't be counted on to last at LEAST 3 years reliably in my book it isn't worth messing with or giving to my customers.

Re:Reminds me of hardcards

[wangerx]

Oh yea, that takes me back. I checked off all of the boxes as you went down the list. Controllers separate from the drives... replaced the controller and the drive was hosed. The whole debug to format was a joy. You were really cooking if you had RLL or ESDI. You were somehow "overclocking" your drive if it could take a 1:1 interlace (or non-interlaced in this case). You'd have to experiment with 2:1 or 3:1 to find out which worked best. You felt cheated if you couldn't get at least 2:1 working. It took hours between tests because you forked over big bucks for a 20 MB Seagate! Lest we not forget the two cables with those marvelous tab connectors.

Re:I've been waiting for these

[im_thatoneguy]

I hear rumblings that Windows 8 is going to finally solve this once and for all at the OS level. Designate a drive as a cache drive and it'll fill it up with frequently used files and the current cache. Then when you go into standby it can just dump all of your RAM to the SSD. Start back up and it reads off the SSD.

Love for OCZ

[mcrbids]

Recently, after reading performance reviews on the Vertex 3, I bought one. The speed is simply amazing! I've been using it as a data-intensive development database server drive. Shortly after buying it, I discovered that there were numerous complaints about the Vertex 2 being unreliable.

To this, I can only say that after about 6 weeks of extremely heavy use as the data partition on a PostgreSQL 8.4 server I've had no issues so far.

Re:Love for OCZ

[dbIII]

I tried to mirror a vertex1 and 2 - they use different types of memory and the 240GB vertex2 drives are actually quite a few GB smaller and unfortunately the data I was going to put on there would thus no longer fit. I ended up striping the things but it took three attempts to get a stripe size with performance equal to or better than a single drive. Attempt 1 and 2 were dog slow with writes and not good for reads, third attempt outperformed both single drives for reads and isn't too bad for writes The moral of the story is the obvious one of using identical drives, but at the time of the original drive getting two of them would have been a bit too expensive.

Re:I've been waiting for these

[mlts]

Windows Vista and newer had the ability to use a technology called ReadyDrive which can use the SSD as a cache, and the spinning platter as the HDD.

So far, there have been very few drives using this technology. It seems like it would be useful, although what would make SSD and conventional HDD pairings more useful would be a hard drive controller doing what most SANs do -- autotiering. Data that is read/written to all the time gets moved to the SSD while stuff that isn't used gets put on the platters.

Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

There are at the very least two other solutions that do the same thing, that were out there before this one:

HighPoint RocketHybrid: exactly the same, an expansion card with connectors for one ssd and one hdd.

Intel Smart Response Technology: Software on top of the Z68 chipset that uses an SSD of up to 60GB as cache for a different drive or raid.

Re:huh?

[AHuxley]

They seem to want to back ~10% of the storage with SSD. Thats the OS, select files and applications?
Your game/photoshop/browser will load SSD fast, the large video clip last watched 4 months ago may not.
How smart will MS be about fitting the 50 or so gigs of used files and sorting 'todays' work?
Will you hit a part of your 500 gb @ 5,400-RPM sort mid game?

Garbage Brand

[Anonymous Coward]

OCZ just recently swapped their NAND for cheaper, denser, slower NAND. They didn't even change the model #. When enough complaints came in, they were forced to RMA everyone's drives or face a bait&switch lawsuit.

Re:Garbage Brand

[the_jone]

I don't know if they're a garbage brand, but OP is certainly right. You can read OCZ's own announcement, or read Anandtech's analysis in their Vertex 3 review. Storagereview did a comparison of the 32nm and 24nm Vertex 2's which is also worth a read. .

Re:Garbage Brand

[tgeek]

Citation Required.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb/2

Not sure this incident should brand OCZ as a "garbage brand" though. If anything it highlights the necessity for the consumer to do their homework and not rely on just the summary specs of a drive before making a purchase. (That's not meant to defend OCZ's mistakes - just pointing out there's more to selecting an SSD than just the summary specs you see printed on the box or in the results of a Newegg search)

Re:huh?

[swilver]

Actually, all you need to cache is meta-data and small files (say anything less than 100 kB). Anything larger (assuming it is unfragmented) can be streamed from a traditional harddisk at speeds comparable to SSD's anyway.

Large files are almost by definition rarely accessed randomly as they are usually some kind of media (image, music, video).

Also, at today's data density, even traditional harddisks can saturate a link as long as the reads are sequential.

Re:I've been waiting for these

[Neil Boekend]

The Eve Online database server uses ramsan, becasue SSD's are too slow. They have 2Tb of network attached RAM.

Uncle Joe reports... Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

> J. Dzhugashvili writes

That's pretty offensive for a large part of the world population!

Just for the record: Josif (Vissarionovich) Dzhugashvili was the birth name of Stalin, the soviet communist dictator, who was more interested in sending people to the Gulags for hard labor, to give them bad memories, rather than hard drives combined with memory chips. Around 25 million did not return, in total.

Wonder if an austrian painter, Adolphus Shicklgruber will report next time about the new USB 4.0 draft standard or so.

Re:I've been waiting for these

[im_thatoneguy]

I think ReadyDrive has failed mostly because it was left to the drive controller to handle the caching.

My understanding is that with Win8 they're moving the logic to the OS and divorcing the hardware from the equation freeing you to buy any old spinning medium and any old fast SSD/Raid to act as your cache.

I like this idea since I can 'upgrade' my existing drives to ReadyDrive by just buying a SSD and I can still have my multiple disks but just the one SSD between them.

No Thanks

[frovingslosh]

Wow! The very high cost of a solid state drive coupled with the power hunger and mechanical constraints of a hard drive. I find it hard to believe that using SSDs as a cache is wise, but I also question if the money couldn't be better spent adding more DDR3 RAM to the processor and letting it cache the drive (with the obvious options and benefits that brings). I think I would just stick with the 2TB drives that I've been buying recently for well under $100 each rather than this overpriced compromise, even if I had a 4x PCIe slot available (which I don't and I expect few who would have an interest in this do).

Re:I've been waiting for these

[GigaplexNZ]

For all its pitfalls, OCZ's solution is ONE DRIVE, hence having the benefit of ONE DRIVE. You can take it out, bring it to a friend, put it in an USB enclosure, etc...

You can? I don't know of any PCIe x4 compatible USB enclosures...

Re:I've been waiting for these

[deroby]

I beg to differ.
I've been using one since september last year and it beats the crap out of the standard HDD. In my team we're all having pretty much the same machine with the same software installed. Because I do a lot of database stuff and also like to have my music collection and some games to carry around I got fed up with the limited capacity of the standard drive and out of frustration bought my own 500Gb Momentus XT. The thing boots *much* faster than all the other machines around me. Outlook takes seconds to start, it takes about a minute for my neighbour. Same for Visual studio.

There's plenty of Youtube vids around that show the impact of the Momentus XT and I can only confirm them. more cache might have been better, but 4Gb sure does a great job !

I f-ing hate OCZ.

[rolfwind]

I was burned once. Paid good money 2 or so years back for 2 fairly pricey SSDs. A couple months down the line, halfway full, they started stuttering like failing harddrives or harddrives waking up. It was painful. There were few reviews online at the time of purchase, but when the problems cropped up, I found out that the controllers in them were considered complete crap and that OCZ wouldn't do anything about screwed customers other than replace failing ones with the same exact model even though they had a new one in the works.

Since then, I've stuck with intel and haven't regretted it. While I realize OCZ probably have their stuff together now, I don't look favorably upon companies that are willing to ship obvious crap. (And they must have realized the problem early in testing already.)

But yes, I do love SSDs. Still use HDD for long-term, rarely accessed storage, but for working on? No comparison.

What about the connectors?

[gr8_phk]

Are motherboards and the PCI connectors going to like the vibration levels of having the drive on the card? I'm not saying it will fail, I just don't know. It's not the normal use case.