SSD array copies 1GB in 4 seconds!

[mancombseepgood]

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/13/battleship-mtron-the-absurdly-fast-ssd-raid-array/

Listen, we know you think your RAID setup is pretty snazzy, and, truth be told, it probably makes our rig look silly by comparison. However, in the computer world, there's always someone out there with a bigger, nastier system -- and we've just spotted one of the nastiest of them all. Next Level Hardware is a site that specializes in putting outrageous setups to the test, and this time they haven't disappointed with their benchmarks on the Mtron 16GB SSD (reportedly the fastest SATA drive in the world). Oh, did we mention the test was on a RAID 0 array of nine drives? Dubbed the "Battleship Mtron," the sickening collection of hardware blazed past the competition (a WD Raptor, less stacked Mtron RAID setups), delivering mind-boggling data swaps like copying a 1GB folder in four seconds. You read that right: four seconds. Like where this is headed? Truck over to the test page and peep all the stats... seriously, it's upsetting.

eish!

 

[BiteMe]

they needed 9 drives to beat the "normal" contestants because although the seek and burst on ssd is great, the sustained transfer is very bad.

 

[mancombseepgood]

they needed 9 drives to beat the "normal" contestants because although the seek and burst on ssd is great, the sustained transfer is very bad.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/10/samsungs-64gb-ssd-better-faster-stronger/

Once we switched over from cleanroom drive tests to formatted drives running operating systems, though, the FlashSSD started to mop the floor with its platter-based counterpart. In Xbench it doubled sequential and random uncached read and write speeds over the platter drive in most cases, topping out at about 52MBps read / 32MBps write.

 

[The_Techie]

Wow, I should get me some of those

 

[BiteMe]

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/10/samsungs-64gb-ssd-better-faster-stronger/

i love your selective quoting abilities.

and the fact that you left out the article you used had 5400rpm laptop drives as comparisons. carry on...carry on..

 

[mancombseepgood]

i love your selective quoting abilities.

and the fact that you left out the article you used had 5400rpm laptop drives as comparisons. carry on...carry on..

You have a problem with me?
I live in the real world, you live in a lab, different strokes for different folks. I work on a notebook, you use a desktop, etc. What does it matter that there are pro's and con's for the different technologies, this is an article detailing the way things are moving, it's not a competition to see who's hard drive is the fastest. However, I think the majority would agree that for the future, SSD's are the way to go.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/mtron_ssd_32_gb/page5.html

Almost 95 MB/s sequential read throughput and 75 MB/s write throughput is an excellent result. Although some 3.5" hard drives such as the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 or the Samsung Spinpoint F1 may reach better maximum results, these drives cannot sustain their high transfer rates.
Putting two of Mtron's 2.5" 32 GB SSD into a RAID 0 array almost doubles the transfer performance.
A constant 94.5 MB/s read transfer rate is a new record for a Flash SSD. This is more than the WD Raptor can do.
Writes are limited to 76.5 MB/s, which is still far more than most 3.5" hard drives provide, and it is slightly better than the write throughput of a WD Raptor. However, the minimum performance still is 73.8 MB, while a Raptor will only write 43.2 MB/s as you get close to the 150 GB capacity.
Fast SAS hard drives deliver over 200 I/O operations per second at this benchmark; the WD Raptor at its 10,000 RPM answers 120 to 180 requests per second using this benchmark pattern. However, the Mtron 32 GB 2.5" SSD dishes up an amazing 550 I/O operations per second, which is almost four times faster than the WD Raptor!
Web servers require lots of small graphics or html files to be delivered. Conventional hard drives typically are limited to a few hundred I/Os per second. SanDisk's SSD5000 does very well in this benchmark, because it does not involve write access, hence it does not show the achilles heel of these drives. Yet a single Mtron 2.5" SSD performs almost as well as a RAID 0 that consists of two SanDisk SSD5000 drives. Almost 5,000 I/Os per second are more than any simple RAID array could ever deliver.
The database benchmark involves a lot or write access - hence it hits the SanDisk drives hard. Even a WD Raptor looks better than them in the database benchmark pattern. Once again Mtron stands out at ~350 I/O operations per second. You need at least two fast SAS hard drives to answer these I/O requests.
The power consumption results aren't impressive. In fact, the Mtron Flash SSD requires at least twice the power than the Samsung or SanDisk drives. Be prepared for a marginal reduction in battery runtime if you install the Mtron drive into your notebook. For high-performance desktops and servers, however, this power requirement is still amazingly low. Compared to the 15-20 W of a 3.5" SAS hard drive at 15,000 RPM; the little drives by Mtron deliver much more I/O performance per Watt.

Clearly, Mtron's new 32 GB 2.5" Flash SSD is the perfect hard drive if you want maximum performance. It can deliver up to 100 MB/s (95 MB/s on our reference test system) and at least two to three times better I/O performance than any mechanical hard drive, or sometimes many times more - even and especially including random writes, which is the achilles heel of Flash SSDs. Power consumption is twice as high as with other Flash SSDs, but still it's only a fraction of what a high performance 3.5" drive requires. Data center administrators will be amazed at the performance per Watt ratio of this new product. Anyone who is looking for a high-performance system drive for her or his enthusiast PC or even servers will jump for joy after experiencing the performance.

What's the catch? Price per gig.
While some folk spend alot of money on the latest super duper CPU, their HDD is in fact still holding the overall effect up... Prices need to drop for SSDs, sure, but for a new product, thats not bad performance and I think we'll be seeing alot more value as prices fall (driven by consumer interest of course). It's a move in the right direction IMO.