Samsung Demos PCIe NVMe SSD At 5.6 GB Per Second, 1 Million IOPS (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Samsung decided to show off their latest SSD wares at Dell World 2015 with two storage products that are sure to impress data center folks. Up and running on display, Samsung showcased their PM1725 drive, which is a half-height, half-length (HHHL) NVMe SSD that will be one of the fastest on the market when it ships later this year. It sports transfer speeds of 5500MB/sec for sequential reads and 1800MB/s for writes. Samsung had the drive running in a server with Iometer fired up and pushing in excess of 5.6GB/sec. The PM1725 also is rated for random reads up to 1,000,000 IOPS and random writes of 120,000 IOPS. The top of the line 6.4TB SSD is rated to handle 32TB of writes per day with a 5-year warranty.

Comments

Pricing?

[smallfries]

How many gigadollars?

Rating vs. Warranty

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung PRO line offers 5 years or total bytes written, whichever comes first, as a part of their warranty package:
http://www.samsung.com/global/...

While this drive "is rated to handle 32TB of writes, every day for five years without failure" - I want to see a warranty to go with that. That's ~58400TB total, about 200 times higher than their best warranty offers right now at 300TBW.

Re:Rating vs. Warranty

[swb]

Given the endurance test people have peformed against "consumer" SSDs, it sure seems like the expected endurance exceeds the warrant by a lot.

This guy:

http://blog.innovaengineering.... ...has 7 PB written to an 850 Pro and it's still going (last blog update was more than a month ago).

I'd be awful curious to see what the actual durability of an 850 Pro would be in a real production SAN. My suspicion is that the better-than-rated endurance coupled with the low replacement cost might make it worthwhile when you consider the staggering performance you would get.

There might even be gimmicks you could apply on a per-disk basis to improve durability, such as underprovisioning each drive by 25% so that you could wear level across more capacity.

Re:Rating vs. Warranty

[TheRaven64]

You don't need an explicit warranty anywhere with sensible consumer protection laws. The Sale of Goods Act in the UK (and equivalents in most EU countries) allow you to return the goods for a full refund if they do not meet the promises made at time of sale. I had a battery fail in an Apple laptop after four and a half years, but within the number of charge cycles that their ads claimed. They replaced it (couriered out a replacement that arrived at 9am the day after I called them at 3pm - better service than I've ever had from them for anything under warranty) as soon as I mentioned the Sale of Goods Act.

Re:Rating vs. Warranty

[CastrTroy]

The trick is that it's a 6.4TB SSD. So that's really only equivent to writing to each sector 9125 times. Seems reasonable to expect that each sector could handle 10000 writes easily. You won't see that kind of load advertised on a 256 GB drive, as it would require the disk to endure over 220,000 writes per sector.

Re:Makes sense

[ledow]

With storage systems moving from the local system into the cloud, you have inherent bottlenecks on the networking.

This might be able to do stupendous speeds but no amount of disk speed will help you get your files up and down. You might be able to process them in the cloud but actually moving them between the cloud and not is still limited by your downstream.

As such, it's actually LOCAL users who are going to benefit more from fast storage, not cloud providers. Hell, just data protection alone is in the spotlight at the moment and has the EU and US arguing and we're on the verge of every cloud company having to have at least a European-only data centre storage (so all the advantages of cloud being a world-wide solution are nullified because you can only hold EU data within the EU).

And, to be honest, Cloud is really just the new name for "external hosted". It's nothing fancy.

With the move to PCIe, how does this scale?

[swb]

More or less, most storage systems are SAS based and achieve capacity scale and IOPS with many units on a SAS bus.

What's the scaling concept behind this? I'm not aware of a (commonly available) storage expansion system based on PCIe connectivity unless you start getting into something like VSAN or the buzzwordy hyperconverged model where compute nodes create a distributed SAN. But this usually requires a lot of nodes.

This kind of storage seems to aim for single server gross performance, which I guess might be aimed at local caching or for DBs running on a native installed OS in most conventional senses. But if you're in a virtualized environment, this seems to run against the grain somewhat -- DBs utilizing local storage and pinned to nodes with the internal storage or if you're using it as a local cache against a more conventional SAN environment, crippling performance when you move a VM until the new nodes local cache catches up.

I guess I'm not seeing how this is better (other than some gross numbers) than more conventional SAS bus aggregation that achieves IOPS through aggregating individual drives. A dozen conventional 1 TB SSDs will provide similar IOPS, greater aggregate storage and redundancy and with SAS-3 backplane probably even greater throughput.

Eduncate me, please.

Re:With the move to PCIe, how does this scale?

[goarilla]

What's the scaling concept behind this? I'm not aware of a (commonly available) storage expansion system based on PCIe connectivity

Isn't that what these things are for eventually: http://www.avagotech.com/produ....

Re: With the move to PCIe, how does this scale?

[swb]

Tomorrow: lots of SAS/SATA SSDs with a few PCIe NVMe drives as cache.

Still not seeing the benefits versus complexity and overhead. In a 24 drive shelf you're looking at close to a million read IOPS and sequential reads into the GBytes/second range for sequential reads *just* from SSDs on a SAS backplane.

Maybe there's some exotic, single-host database environment that would benefit from this, but a SSD-only solution would saturate 16GBFC with multipathing. At the point of combining NVMe and SSD, you're now spending more on exotic interconnect fabrics to get the data off the host than you are on the storage.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

As such, it's actually LOCAL users who are going to benefit more from fast storage, not cloud providers.

Only if you completely ignore all processing of stored data within the cloud infrastructures.

Uploading and download files to/from a cloud isn't really where a super-fast SSD will be used, primarily.

850 Pro Enterprise Use

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm testing this theory right now. I'm using 850 Pros in RAID 10 arrays. We'll see how it goes. My math says I should be fine for 7 years, but the anxiety after only 3 months is palpable.

The issue isn't that a $500 drive might fail. The issue is that if the drives start failing, I have to chuck and replace $23,000 worth of drives.

Re:850 Pro Enterprise Use

[Anonymous Coward]

i've been running on 840pros in a datacenter enviroment and i haven't had one fail on me yet in two years. recently we've changed to ordering 850pros for new servers and in the 3-4 months we've done that i haven't seen a dead one either.

Re:850 Pro Enterprise Use

[Qzukk]

but the anxiety after only 3 months is palpable.

I assume they're under warranty for the next while.

My fear would be that there is an intelesque hard limit on writes that bricks the drive, and ALL of your drives in a RAID array will hit that limit simultaneously.

Re:Impressive

[fnj]

In the days of the HD204UI 2TB, I want to say maybe 10 years ago, Samsung owned the disk drive reliability world. While they were sold, I wouldn't get anything else. Seagate and WD were crap even then. All of my 20+ HD204UIs still work flawlessly after 5+ years of largely 24x7 operation.

Re:All SSDs must be loaded with this haiku

[sexconker]

Haikus are for cows
Moo. Moooooo cows! Moo your haikus.
You haikuing cows.