SSD with New HSDL Interface Boasts Gobs of Bandwidth

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/OCZ-IBIS-HSDL-Solid-State-Drive-Preview/

by MojoKid • 16 years ago

33 29 16 years ago

MojoKid• 16 years ago

240GB model offers up to 740MB/sec max read throughput and 720MB/sec maximum write throughput. Of course, blazing fast SSD technology like this also comes at a premium, as you'd expect.

mhansen3• 16 years ago

For some perspective:

    cat /dev/sda | pv > /dev/null

Reads 188MB/s on my new Thinkpad's Samsung SSD

mrb2• 16 years ago

cat'ing and piping into pv is a poor way to benchmark as the CPU overhead is too high (the buffer size for a pipe kernel object is 4kB, forcing a high number of context switches). Try "dd bs=32k </dev/sda >/dev/zero" and monitor with "iostat -m 1", you will see a higher throughput.

gjm11• 16 years ago

Note: the above is a verbatim quotation from the article. I think it's poor form to do that without indicating that it's a quotation.

jtchang• 16 years ago

SSD technology is a game changer for data centers. Traditional hard drives generate loads of heat and being able to outfit a whole data center with them reduces cooling significantly which directly affects the bottom line (cooling is the #1 expense for the vast majority of data centers).

Now I'm just waiting for our broadband to inch up to 740MB/sec :)

reitzensteinm3• 16 years ago

Acutally this SSD in particular consumes about as much power as a 10k RPM Raptor desktop drive when active (http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-dri...), although having served requests quickly it can then go back to its idle state much faster.

In terms of online gigabytes per watt, SSDs will lose out badly to traditional hard drives. IOPS per watt, of course, is a whole different story, and hard drive IO bottlenecked servers will run potentially an order of magnitude faster.

So rather than outfitting whole datacenters with them, both technologies will live side by side for quite a few years to come. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if spinning rust lives on longer in data centers than mainstream PCs and laptops.

jcroberts2• 16 years ago

  >In terms of online gigabytes per watt, SSDs will 
  >lose out badly to traditional hard drives.

Incorrect. You forgot time. Think about it this way (with very rough numbers); The traditional Raptor drive will move data at 70 MiByte/s. These new SSD's move data 700 MiByte/s. Assuming that they both consume equivalent power, this new SSD will have a gigabyte-per-watt rating TEN TIMES BETTER than traditional drives.

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

How do you figure? Surely SSD drives have lower power consumption than a bunch of spinning platters, even when considering the increased number you need.

junkbit• 16 years ago

The single port version is akin to a dedicated RAID card with 4 Sandforce-1200 SSDs.

The main benefit of this connection is the 4 port version in a single PCI Express x16 2.0 slot. Anandtech predicts it might reach 2.5GB/s

Hopefully, if this takes off OEMs can drop the internal SATA RAID going on inside the device for even further gains.

EDIT: also very encouraging is the internal garbage collection that goes on when the disk is idle. Trim does not work on RAID and it is great to see performance can still be regained after prolonged use.

ck2• 16 years ago

Why not give them a window right into memory (ala himem or EMM) and then SSD can also have "execute in place" ability someday when they are fast enough.

Andys2• 16 years ago

Intel's looking at doing this, with an interface from the southbridge and probably soon from the CPU itself. I think eventually for low-end PCs and netbooks, CPUs will just have big L3 (DRAM) caches, and flash behind that, and no system DRAM at all.

pjscott2• 16 years ago

If they can get the power of the CPU down low enough, they could probably bolt on a DRAM layer, right on top of the CPU die, and connect them with through-silicon vias. Your L3 cache could have the same die size as the CPU, and the connection to the CPU could be very fast, both in bandwidth and in latency.

Actually, these "low-end PCs and netbooks" are sounding like speed demons, the more I think about them.

wmf2• 16 years ago

The latency of NAND flash (~25us) is still orders of magnitude too high to support MMIO access, so you're better off using DMA a la Fusion io or Violin. PCM-M may be a different story if it arrives.

jfb• 16 years ago

This is utterly bonkers. I badly want one.

zokier• 16 years ago

Why is it better to have the RAID controller integrated on the disk instead of connecting several (cheaper) disks separately and use motherboards or software RAID

bcl• 16 years ago

Faster throughput due to less busses to pass through. It likely also has something to do with why it appears to be so fast, using the RAID to spread the load across multiple groups of Flash chips.

In addition by using the SI3124 chip I think this thing will 'Just Work(tm)' with recent Linux kernels -- its the same chipset in the SATA card I use for SW RAID. I'd be happy to test my theory if someone would send me a drive ;)

SSD with New HSDL Interface Boasts Gobs of Bandwidth

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