Slashdot Mirror
OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Unveiled With Nearly 2.7GB/Sec Tested Throughput (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Solid State Drive technology continues to make strides in performance, reliability and cost. At the CES 2016 show there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though not many made quite the splash that Toshiba's OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. OCZ is tapping on Toshiba's NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater. The drive boasts specs conservatively at 2.4GB/sec for reads and 1.6GB/sec for writes in peak sequential transfer bandwidth. IOPs are rated at 210K and 140K for writes respectively. In the demo ATTO test they were running, the RevoDrive 400 actually peaks at 2.69GB/sec for reads and also hits every bit of that 1.6GB/sec write spec for large sequential transfers.
Why the huge PCIe card for such a tiny device on a relatively unpopulated PCB?
I had two of these 120 gigabyte SSD drives, one old size firmware, one new as it decreased the physical size of the drive.
Both failed spectacularly.
I think it is more than a little amusing that anyone cares about performance numbers on a drive like this without first asking whether the drive provides any assurance that it won't catastrophically lose all your data, if not be bricked permanently, due to a simple power loss. That seems to be par for the course with the most of the SSDs on the market. Preserving your data? That is an enterprise feature.
Big data, here I come! If only my users would keep up instead of trying to view it with less than 8GB of RAM and a single (!) dual core processor. How the hell am I supposed to track that and not give them a bad user experience?
I don't use them, anymore; I got tired of them using me.
What this slashvertisement fails to mention is that this nvme is only fractionally better (1%) of the performance specifications of existing NVME brands which are already available to consumers.
And will provide you with all the power less protection you might need.
Is the threat of power loss and the data loss risk associated with it somehow a new thing that people haven't been concerned with an dealing with relatively inexpensively for a long time?
I think you could also make an argument that SSDs might be less likely to lose data vs. spinning rust, as their greater speed means that disk transactions are more likely to be completed faster, leaving the device idle more often and thus less likely to be in the middle of a transaction if the power is lost.
While I'm sure there's a whole world of forum posters with their disk benchmarks in their warlording signature who go for this kind of thing because they want to be the guy with the best benchmark numbers, what's the actual performance gain in a typical kind of scenario vs. a SATA3 SSD?
These kinds of sequential benchmarks don't really tell me how much real-world time something like this will shave off booting a computer, launching an application, etc versus a more conventional solution.
UPS doesn't protect you from power supply failure. I've had about five of those so far.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So I thought I recalled that OCZ went bust and i was right because this isn't the same OCZ, it's OCZ Storage Solutions not OCZ Technology Group. Basically, Toshiba bought up the remnants of the company and took the name and logo and founded OCZ Storage Solutions on January 21, 2014. So of course they are using Toshiba's this and that because they are Toshiba.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I was one of the ones burned by low reliability on early OCZ SSD drives. I know they were bought by Toshiba, so things might have changed. However, most SSD are so fast these days for a desktop that I rather trade some of the speed for known reliability. Unfortunately, it is hard to get a metric for reliability that you can trust.
So stop buying cheap, shitty power supplies. I've never had a power supply failure.
So stop buying cheap, shitty power supplies. I've never had a power supply failure.
While I've had more failures from cheap, shitty power supplies than from name brand ones, I've also had name brand ones fail.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One to read one to write. Push a physical button and it can no longer write. No writing no hacking.
And how the fuck does that help when there's a power cut ?
I'm afraid our AC is not a master logician, drinkypoo. We'll never get him to understand the difference between the fairy-rale "cannot fail" and the real-life "all of them can fail".
"Buy a UPS!"
...Then you buy a gods damned UPS!!! Jesus, pay a-fucking-ttention!
"UPS doesn't protect against the PSU failing."
"Stop buying shitty PSUs!"
"But what about loss of power?"
Warranty baby,
warranty baby, what spinning disk will give a ten year warranty on your drive like a Samsung 850 Pro?
I think I know where is thebetter data safety.
Now that said, I back up all my data from the SSD to a spinning disk that I keep turned off most of the time.
My shop deals in Samsung ssds. Have not seen any data loss from power failure yet. However we recently saw a custom built serverr with a 1000w gold antec psu not only have PSU failure, but shunt wall voltage down the rail powering data drives. 3 of 5 drives were quite literally smoked.
Silence is a state of mime.
I continue to think of the name OCZ as the SSD equivalent to a Yugo auto, even though they have new owners. I will not buy one.
A or An for UPS depends on whether you pronounce is as an initialism ( a You Pee ESS) or as an acronym (an UPS). UPS is one of those peculiar ones that is pronounced either way depending on the speaker.
Happy to be at your service.
In any SSD lacking infallible power-loss-protection, IOPs should never be cited at a queue depth > 4.
Of course, we can make a small exception for rainbow-eating Unicorns, whose data-center workloads don't require a corresponding level of data-center fault tolerance.
You can buy redundant ones intended for servers - they instantly switch to a backup.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
If I had that much success with powersupplies I would be putting a power quality meter on my electricity supply and then holding my supplier accountable. Seriously a switchmode powersupply should and usually does happily run for a decade or more without so much as a hiccup, and in the grand scheme of computer failures it's pretty much down the very bottom of the list.
Or at least should be, go get your power checked, specifically for nasty harmonics or overvoltage.
I've had them fail across the board. I prefer name brand power supplies because they have quieter fans, and use better components (or at least supposed to... since the capacitor popping thing is now history, the difference between a Japanese cap and a Taiwanese cap may just be the distance in a shipping container it traveled to the Chinese assembly plant.)
What I do notice is that power makes a big difference. I'm probably going to just bite the bullet, buy an AGM battery, a multi-stage battery charger (rectifier), a high quality, PSW inverter, and built a decent enclosure with adequate cooling to stuff this all in. As an added bonus, I can add a solar charge controller so the battery or battery bank. This not just functions as an always-on UPS (as opposed to standby), but it gives very clean power, no matter how bad the mains power is. A standby UPS is OK... but it doesn't protect well against dirty power. An always-on UPS is useful... but I can build a setup like this for cheaper, for something just as reliable.
I don't get why this is 'news'. I benched my Samsung 950 Pro 512GB using the same CrystalDiskMark software and saw rates that were almost the same (slightly lower for same categories, slightly higher for others. Is this another SlashAd?
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.0 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s (SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s)
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2582.281 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1531.208 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 723.082 MB/s (176533.7 IOPS)
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 421.100 MB/s (102807.6 IOPS)
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 2200.869 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1186.831 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 49.879 MB/s ( 12177.5 IOPS)
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 208.751 MB/s ( 50964.6 IOPS)
I have not had any non-OCZ drive fail. I bought an OCZ drive a couple of years ago and within two weeks of relatively light duty (Linux boot drive) it bricked.
Last year I was working on a project and the machine they gave me had an OCZ enterprise class drive. Within two weeks the drive was corrupting data, rendering the machine unusable. I will never buy another OCZ drive again. I still have two OCZ drives but they are backed up daily.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
If I had that much success with powersupplies I would be putting a power quality meter on my electricity supply and then holding my supplier accountable.
Oh? You have a SLA from your power company? No? Hmm, so you are sure that your PUC will do your bidding?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Summary says:
"...the RevoDrive 400 actually peaks at 2.69GB/sec for reads and also hits every bit of that 1.6GB/sec write spec for large sequential transfers."
One would hope that it does indeed hit every bit while writing :). Less than that seems an exercise in futility. Or marketing, perhaps :)
Yes I do. It's codified in national standards through which generation and power distribution companies need to comply and includes things like average voltage, frequency, peak voltages, duration outside voltages, THD, etc.
I wonder why so many in a tech savvy and marketing averse community got so burned by a company that only lived through its marketing, ignoring the writing on the wall about its reliability, which was known since almost the beginning of it's failed SSD line. I agree in that they should have used the Toshiba brand but I imagine they are using that one for the enterprise market.
in my experience (with servers), all power supplies WILL fail eventually. i've only ever seen 1 power supply last over 10 years. i recently decommissioned a supermicro server with 3PSUs after 10.5 years of running continuously without a single reboot (rsync server for backups). 2 power supplies had been dead before i turned it off, the 3rd gave up its ghost when i tried turning it on again.
normally, i change power supplies preemptively every 3 years but for this server, replacements were more expensive than the server itself.
i admit, datacentre conditions are significantly different from home environment - ridiculous temperatures, servers running on full load for hours on end - so desktop PSUs may be able to run for longer than my server average of 5-6 years.
And yet, the utilities in the USA are known specifically for failing to do that. When the first grid-tie inverters were designed, they immediately reported an error when connected and had to be readjusted for different assumptions because the utilities reliably meet none of the standards they have set for themselves, and for those who would connect to their system. This is the standard state of affairs, and nothing you can do will change it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow. There really is nothing good about America is there. Utilities in many other countries need to meet the standard or face the regulator or worse still a customer with money. While I was in Australia we specifically took the local supplier to the regulator because of the issue which forced a substation upgrade and was also instrumental in the campaign to get a new 110kV feed into our part of the neighbourhood (because who thought hooking a refinery, a chemical plant and an airport to a consumer grade network was a fucking good idea).
Heck we had service level agreements for power outages too. If the power was out for longer than a day we got compensation. Not much, but enough to replace all the food in an American sized fridge.