Solid State Drives (RAID) superhuman speed

[DeLuSioNal29]

Check this out...

24 Solid State Drives in Raid

[clok]

Somebody want to send me a couple (no i dont need 24) to test out for say, 1-2 years?


Clok

[VicBond007]

SSDs are only now reaching speeds that are useful.  Previous generation drives, as young as 3 months ago, used controllers to maximize their single file read/write speeds so that review sites could sell SSDs with fantasy numbers that don't apply to the real world.  VERY rarely with "normal" computing are you going to have large blocks of sustained, single file read/write activity.  Ever wonder why those 4-drive Raptor RAID0s pulling 500MB/sec still take minutes to boot Windows?  It's because their random access read/write still sucks, and until recently, most SSDs had really bad random r/w as well. 

I use a current-gen Intel X25-M in my video editing computer as a system drive, and will be using one in my MAME cabinet as well despite the price tag of over $300 for 80GB.  This SSD, along with the X25-E, and OCZ's Vortex SSD, use a new kind of controller which lowers the single file performance, but boosts the random r/w performance tremendously.  The X25-M has a random read/write performance that is over 50x faster than my 300GB Velociraptor, the king of consumer level hard drives.

What's this mean for a MAME cabinet?

My editing rig has a lot of add-in cards with specialized drivers, so even with a clean startup, my boot time was over 2 minutes.  with the SSD it is 16 seconds after the POST sequence finishes.  Managing thousands of ROMs, refreshing directory lists, building control.dat files, any sort of mass-automation that the MAME cab user does on a regular basis is now done instantly.

Anandtech recently did a great write-up comparing SSDs and explaining just why people who manage thousands of small files (us!) should toss our platters out the window:  http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Interestingly, the Samsungs shown in this video are one of the worst in the bunch, actually under-performing a Velociraptor in a lot of scenarios, even in random writing.

[Turnarcades]

Wish I knew more about RAID arrays as a storage source as I would probably run one in my cab.

[Bluedeath]

with 24 disks in raid 0 even if you use punched cards instead of diksks you would have lightning speed.

[VicBond007]

with 24 disks in raid 0 even if you use punched cards instead of diksks you would have lightning speed.

Kinda/sorta.  Back in high school, for kicks, I took 12 USB floppy drives and ran some app on an ancient Mac that let me build a RAID-0 from USB devices.  It got almost 800KB/sec sustained read speeds, almost as fast as your set-top DVD player.  Random access speed still blew though so it was useless other than the fact that it allowed me to use "floppy disk" and "RAID" in the same sentence.

[Ummon]

Cute. And interesting.

[taz-nz]

The single 24 Port raid controller is a huge bottle neck in that setup, I'm guessing you would see no difference in preformance even if you removed between 8-12 of the drives. The IO processors on the current generation of RAID controllers were never designed to handle the kinds of single drive preformance you see with SSDs.

Some simple maths shows just how bad that bottle neck is, the Samsung SDD used are rated at 220MB/s read, 200Mb/s write, so lets take the lower of the two, 200MB/s x 24 drives =  4800MB/s  (4.68GB/s), now they managed 2019MB/s (1.97GB/s) which isn't the 2GB/s they claim. So basically they only got about 42% of the theoretical preformance possible with 24 of those drives, even allowing for non-linear scaling and the increased latencies you get with any raid array it's still a bad result.


You want real preformance you want four Fusion IO Duo cards, 1.5GB/s each, linear scaling in RAID gives you a maxium of throughput of 6GB/s. 



Unfortunately it's not clear if they are bootable or not, there are plenty of self proclaimed experts on the web that say they are not because the older Fusion IO card were not, but I'll wait until I hear it from a reliable source. That and the fact they are aimed at the enterprise market and thus have a huge price tag to match means your not likely to see one in MAME cabinet anytime soon.

[u_rebelscum]

I use a current-gen Intel X25-M in my video editing computer....

Have you run into the slow down mentioned in anandtech's review (or in PC Perspective)?

I'm interested in SSDs, but not quite ready to spend $$$ on smaller drives yet, especially with all the differences in quality of all the first & second (& third?) generation of SSDs.

[VicBond007]

Have you run into the slow down mentioned in anandtech's review (or in PC Perspective)?

I'm interested in SSDs, but not quite ready to spend $$$ on smaller drives yet, especially with all the differences in quality of all the first & second (& third?) generation of SSDs.

I use it as a boot drive, not for storage, and all my apps are configured to use my RAID for swap space instead of the system drive (the SSD).  I usually use my laptop for web browsing and chatting (browser cache/chat logs constantly being modified) so the two major contributing factors to SSD degradation are not an issue with my main system.  My pagefile is a static size, and my system restore is turned off.  Really, the worst amount of damage is probably in the area that my World of Warcraft installation sits in (Gotta feed the addiction!) since all of the player/zone loading is hell on a drive's read/writes.

I have not had it that long, and I'm not running disk-wide benchmarks to deliberately kill it.  Under NORMAL usage, the drive seems to be holding up just fine, though I don't have the numbers to back up that claim yet.  I'll get back to you in a few months

What you have to consider is that SSD aging really doesn't affect read performance at all, only writing (random being the biggest hit).  But think about it...even with a 50% performance hit, it's still showing 20x or so FASTER random file writes than my Velociraptor.  It's not as fast as when you bought it, but it's still ridiculously fast.  Windows 7 + Firmware upgrades should make this virtually a non-issue, so I think if you're holding out for a drive controller that won't degrade the SSD's performance over time, you're outta luck.  Easier for manufacturers to say "Let MS fix it" than to reinvent the wheel.