800MB/s Sequential and almost 600MB/s random?! I now wonder where my piggy bank is?
In all seriousness, OCZ has got a winner here, the only thing I do regret is having few PCIe ports... hopefully the HD6900s series will help open up a port.
AFAIK A 32 deep IO Queue isn't something you're going to see outside a heavily loaded server. The 150/200 on random and 320/380 on sequential are more in line with what a typical end user will get.
I think these Indilynx controllers might be faster than Sandforce for REAL workloads like COPY & PASTE under XP!
I wish Anand would directly compare copy/paste speeds of both SATA and PCIe SSD's under XP as that IS the Number One Operating System for the forseeable future!
I think that how an SSD handles non-compressible data or data already on the drive are the most enlightening tests one could do to directly compare SSD Controllers under common workloads
Now, if OCZ could just make their stuff plug and play under XP without all the endless tweaks, or OS upgrades, we'd have a winner untill Intel starts making PCIe SSD's
Chant in unison.... Plug & Play Plug & Play Plug & Play Plug & Play Plug & Play
XP is still number one .... for now. Windows 7 is selling very fast, and people are upgrading constantly. Within 3-4 years XP will be all but a memory.
I don't see any real reason to doubt that 4x Vertex 2s would perform identically, especially with a discrete RAID card of reasonable quality, but has it actually been verified on the integrated RAID that comes with a "performance mainstream motherboard", both AMD and Intel?
It wouldn't be incredibly surprising to me to see some previously unknown performance reducing bugs crop up when you start pushing the kinds of numbers we're seeing here with integrated RAID solutions.
intel ICH max's out at around 700-800MB/s with RAID 0 more ssds does not add muh more data rate {adds maybe 20-50MB/s per extra ssd}(random access speed mite be higher), it has been tested
Fusion IO seems to have the right idea by (according to them) getting rid of the raid controller (aka the middle man) and feeding the data directly to the bus. Perhaps it's time OCz and others start looking at their approach to things.
Thanks for a more straightforward review Anand. Since this is largely the same as the previously-reviewed IBIS, I think in addition to rehashing those benchmarks, it would be more interesting to get hard data on your claim that...
"The reality for OCZ however is there’s no performance benefit to purchasing a RevoDrive x2 over four Vertex 2s and creating your own RAID array"
I'd love to see what 4x SF-1200 drives do on an ICH10R, or a discreet RAID card running off the IOH.
* Drive is able to sustain massive read bandwidth - check * Drive is able to sustain massive write bandwidth - check * a lot of IOps - check * but why the heck PCI-X? Unless I'm totally mistaken and this is one of the few PCI-X 2.0 devices, you have NO error correction what so ever on this path and only puny even parity checking which will eventually fail and let's you read/write junk :( (caveat, maybe I misinterpret the PCI(-X) specs, if so please correct me)...
Bad investment and misguided. You can easily achieve these results with basic software RAID card (like Highpoint Rocket RAID 6xx) and 4 cheap SSDs. And if you buy proper RAID controller (say Areca 1261ML) and plug anything between 4 and 16 small SSDs in RAID 0 or 10 you will simply trounce Revo in every possible way. While it is more expansive short term, you can always freely expand storage space with bigger SSDs without too much hassle. You can't do that with Revo.
Honestly SSDs are still a premium product. And for a premium product Revo is not good enough. I would certainly buy Photofast GM-Powerdrive, not Revo. Of course it is more expansive (2.5x) but it offers twice the performance (PCI-Ex x8 not x4 like in RevoDrive), and full hardware RAID support from R0 to 60 (not some software rubbish from SilImg, brrr).
I like the idea of the FusionIO, but it is not for normal PC users. It is fine investment tho if you own gold mine, oil derrick, first name is $heikh, you are footballer, work for a mafia, or you are a banker. Take your pick! ;)
IMHO the RevoDrives are useless products. You gain nothing except high sequential bandwith, which most users never need. In REAL world applications, the CPU limits anyway in high IOPS scenarios. You won't see a big gain (if any) if you move from 1 Vertex 2 to 4 Vertex 2 in typical situations.
Anand, this is not directly related with the article, but when do you expect the SSD prices to take a big hit? With the next generation of drives around the corner and talks of increased flash manufacturing capacities do you think it is reasonable to by and SSD (regardless of the interface) now simply from a $/GB prospective?
Hey Anand could you shed light on a annoying bug that's plaguing several but not all owners of Sandforce based SSDs? It happens when there is not a lot of I/O activity, like when idle or light usage. The drive disappears and you see all the programs opened failing one at a time, until a couple of minutes later windows gives up with a BSOD. As the drive disappeared the kernel can't even write a memory dump, and if you press reset the drive isn't recognized by the BIOS, you have to cycle power to see it working again. There is also a resume from sleep bug that however it's tolerable as you can use hibernation instead of sleep. Here there is a topic on Corsair forums about this, they just released a 2.0 firmware but there is no change log and of course no word from Sandforce. http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8...
It is not on companies like OCZ to release a faster SSD controller. As I been saying for ages now, it is up to AMD/Intel to release an SSD controller integrated directly into the CPU. It makes as much sense as having an integrated memory controller. It's actually pretty much the same exact thing, except the memory is nonvolatile. It should be in the same form factor to reduce costs (keyed differently of course). ie, a 64GB SSD DIMM would cost half of a 64GB SSD. Perhaps even less.
The maths of SSD controllers aren't yet settled, which is why SandForce is different from Intel which is different from Indilinx and so forth. If the SSD controller is in the CPU case, you're stuck with it, unless you buy a new CPU. Hmmm. Frequent, planned, obsolescence; may be Intel will do it, then.
I am not aware of any motherboard-integrated RAID controller that can handle the bandwidth of these 4 Sandforce SSDs. I use 3 X-25E's in RAID0 on the ICH10R, generally regarded as the best integrated RAID controller, and it is maxed at 660MB/sec.
So I like this card and am pleased that companies such as OCZ are working on this kind of thing!
Yep. ICH10R gets to 500-650MB/s - never seen more. It may be, that the ICH10R is connected via a 2GB/s-Bus or whatever, but that's theory. Or, the controller itself cannot handle more (which is a reasonable explanation - if you look at controllers from areca, they also max out at 1-2GB/s - and they are way more expensive).
Argh! Why do motherboard and peripheral manufacturer's take so long to release port upgrades? They churn out new processors and chipsets all the time, but lag behind on interconnecting high speed devices. I am so sick of the USB 2.0, serial and parallel ports still found many motherboards. Give me USB 3 and the new Intel optical interface. First you have to mass market them, then devices will come out that supprt them. Give us faster lanes. Music vendors are even worse. Keyboards still were using floppy drives and scsi ports during the last decade and use slower, lower capacity sd-ram.
Chipsets are proprietary but high speed interconnects like SATA, USB ect. are industry standards which anyone can make devices for. Proprietary designs are easier to build as the designers know exactly the limited number of devices they interface with.
The other issue with standards is that until chipsets include them, they'll incur an extra cost via an external chip for motherboard manufacturers. Thus even though the standard is complete and available, there will be some resistance for acceptance.
Does this card offer management of the RAID controller, i.e. can the RAID be turned off (JBOD mode)? There are a couple of scenarios where having 4 separate 'drives' is preferable to a single stripe set.
Does TRIM still work if you do RAID/striping in software?
Don't underestimate the value of ease-of-installation. That can add up pretty quickly to even a moderate sized organization. If it only takes a couple of minutes to install or swap a drive-on-a-card, versus drive-in-a-HD-format, you can make up the premium in price quickly.
Advertisements are from a completely separate company, and they're basically "randomly" selected. I say randomly in quotes because I'm not even sure of all the details--some company could buy all of the storage ad space for a month if they were so inclined. I've read many a magazine where an ad appears opposite a review, and in some cases those are very negative reviews.
Any good (and smart) company keeps editorial staff separate from the advertising, and AnandTech operates that way. I can say with 100% honesty that no one has ever asked me to deal with advertising, and that never once has anyone suggested I give a better review to a product because they're "a big advertiser." In fact, I know of a couple instances where companies have threatened to pull advertising because of negative (or at least not glowing) reviews, and Anand pretty much said see you later.
Other than that, I'm not sure what in this article would undermine credibility based on the ads anyway, as my impression is more of a, "yeah, it works, and it's like RAID-0 with four SSDs only you use a single PCIe slot. It carries a price premium as well, secure erase can be iffy, TRIM doesn't work so you have to depend on idle garbage collection, and we encountered a bug on SandForce when writing lots of uncompressable data". That's definitely not enough for me to want to jump at the Revo X2, especially considering the price.
How much faster will it boot my PC over other SSD's or RAided drives? how long will it load a level of the 5 most popular games? Five us real world tangible statistics... IO's mean nothing to a gamer.
the OCZ vertex 2 120gb x 2 seems to be lacking QD32 benchmarks to compare it at the same performance metric, also shouldn't OCZ vertex 2 120gb x 4 also been included since that's the apples to apples comparison to a revo drive x2 in terms of controller count?? And for that matter, why isn't the original revodrive shown for reference aswell?
i'm blown away by the revodrive x2 unfortunately that's cause there aren't any other numbers to compare it too...
I couldn't find the PCIe gen in this article or the original RevoDrive one. Another site says it's PCIe 1. With all the talk about bandwidth, this is relevant. So PCIe 1 x4 = 1GB/s, and you used 804MB of that.
Also, the charts are sort of hard to read with all the text and common colors; here's a way to improve it: http://i53.tinypic.com/3480bw4.png
Otherwise, good review. I think motherboards need to start including non-graphics multi-lane PCIe to accommodate high bandwidth drives.
Give us some Real-World numbers for a worst case scenario!
Running Windows XP-SP2 on one of these with XP partitions (Not Aligned) and ZERO SSD Tweeks, how fast can these drives copy and paste 1GB of data with over 1000 files in at least 100 directories
A vertex 2 can do it @ a meager 3.636MB / sec A 2.5 inch 5400RPM WD Laptop drive is FASTER than a Vertex 2 in this type of test A 7200RPM WD Desktop Drive is A LOT faster
SSD's are still CRAP at copying and pasting uncompressible data around on the sasme drive that its stored on
But they boot about as fast as my 300X Compact Flash
That's like saying I am going to limit my HDD to PIO mode and bench it against another one in UDMA mode.
Pretty much assinine, I mean you can even fix an unaligned partition and move an unaligned one from an HDD to an SSD and make it aligned. It's not very hard...
I don't know how Anand does his test... but I have 2 revo drive 240 gb in a stripe on an i7 based asus super computer and i get 1028 MBytes per second.
I break the revo drive stripe, stripe in windows, and align the drive.
Anand, if you're investigating the real-world impact of the idle garbage collection bug, can you use a full-disk encryption product, such as Truecrypt? I believe even when you just initialise a TrueCrypt drive (the recommended slow version, not the quick), it fills every sector with random garbage for security purposes, which is presumably uncompressible. I suspect that, until such encryption products are written to interface with the TRIM command, they will cause you a real world problem right there and then, because they'll fill the disk with uncompressible data from the get-go. Remind us, do Sandforce implement full-drive encryption themselves, mitigating the need for programs like TrueCrypt when you want encryption?
Something unrelated also springs to mind. You have previously slated Samsung SSDs for their relatively poor performance and - now I can't remember for sure, so correct me if I'm wrong - lack of TRIM. However I've read elsewhere that the later Samsung SSDs, e.g. since maybe a year ago or so, actually recognise when they are being formatted with an NTFS file system. This would theoretically allow them two things: (A) Automatically align the file system sector/cluster boundaries with SSD sectors and (B) Perform TRIM internally, because it understands NTFS and knows which sectors are empty. If true, then I think this is really quite smart. It avoids the need for TRIM altogether and should work across all Windows operating systems that use NTFS, even XP. The downside is, if Microsoft change NTFS in such a way as to break Samsung's understanding of it. That would, hypothetically, create an incompatibility with future Microsoft OSs.
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46 Comments
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jav6454 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
800MB/s Sequential and almost 600MB/s random?! I now wonder where my piggy bank is?In all seriousness, OCZ has got a winner here, the only thing I do regret is having few PCIe ports... hopefully the HD6900s series will help open up a port.
DanNeely - Saturday, November 6, 2010 - link
AFAIK A 32 deep IO Queue isn't something you're going to see outside a heavily loaded server. The 150/200 on random and 320/380 on sequential are more in line with what a typical end user will get.Out of Box Experience - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
I think these Indilynx controllers might be faster than Sandforce for REAL workloads like COPY & PASTE under XP!I wish Anand would directly compare copy/paste speeds of both SATA and PCIe SSD's under XP as that IS the Number One Operating System for the forseeable future!
I think that how an SSD handles non-compressible data or data already on the drive are the most enlightening tests one could do to directly compare SSD Controllers under common workloads
Now, if OCZ could just make their stuff plug and play under XP without all the endless tweaks, or OS upgrades, we'd have a winner untill Intel starts making PCIe SSD's
Chant in unison....
Plug & Play Plug & Play Plug & Play Plug & Play Plug & Play
mr woodstock - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
XP is still number one .... for now.Windows 7 is selling very fast, and people are upgrading constantly.
Within 3-4 years XP will be all but a memory.
boe - Thursday, November 18, 2010 - link
I agree about PCIe ports. I could swing one x4 or faster PCIe port however since I need about 2TB of storage I'll be needing a lot more slots!mianmian - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Using such a small connector to mount the daughter card seems not that reliable. I looks going to fall apart someday.puplan - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
There is nothing wrong with the connector. The daughter board is held by 4 screws.GeorgeH - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
I don't see any real reason to doubt that 4x Vertex 2s would perform identically, especially with a discrete RAID card of reasonable quality, but has it actually been verified on the integrated RAID that comes with a "performance mainstream motherboard", both AMD and Intel?It wouldn't be incredibly surprising to me to see some previously unknown performance reducing bugs crop up when you start pushing the kinds of numbers we're seeing here with integrated RAID solutions.
Minion4Hire - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Yea, I thought that the max combined bandwidth from ICH10 was something like 660MB/s...?disappointed1 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
"ICH10 implements the 10Gbit/s bidirectional DMI interface to the "northbridge" device."That's 1.25GB/s bidirectional
disappointed1 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Of course, DMI itself is "a (perhaps modified) PCI-E x4 v1.1 interface"disappointed1 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
oops, Intel block diagrams depict that as 2GB/sStuka87 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
That bandwidth isn't dedicated to the drives though. Its shared with other devices.leexgx - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
intel ICH max's out at around 700-800MB/s with RAID 0 more ssds does not add muh more data rate {adds maybe 20-50MB/s per extra ssd}(random access speed mite be higher), it has been testedGooger - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Fusion IO seems to have the right idea by (according to them) getting rid of the raid controller (aka the middle man) and feeding the data directly to the bus. Perhaps it's time OCz and others start looking at their approach to things.http://www.fusionio.com/
disappointed1 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
They're not bootable and cost thousands of dollars - totally different market segment.disappointed1 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Thanks for a more straightforward review Anand. Since this is largely the same as the previously-reviewed IBIS, I think in addition to rehashing those benchmarks, it would be more interesting to get hard data on your claim that..."The reality for OCZ however is there’s no performance benefit to purchasing a RevoDrive x2 over four Vertex 2s and creating your own RAID array"
I'd love to see what 4x SF-1200 drives do on an ICH10R, or a discreet RAID card running off the IOH.
RealMurphy - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
* Drive is able to sustain massive read bandwidth - check* Drive is able to sustain massive write bandwidth - check
* a lot of IOps - check
* but why the heck PCI-X? Unless I'm totally mistaken and this is one of the few PCI-X 2.0 devices, you have NO error correction what so ever on this path and only puny even parity checking which will eventually fail and let's you read/write junk :( (caveat, maybe I misinterpret the PCI(-X) specs, if so please correct me)...
Powerlurker - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Supposedly, it's because OCZ realized that a PCI-X controller plus PCI-X to PCIe bridge cost significantly less then a native PCIe RAID controller.ypsylon - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Bad investment and misguided. You can easily achieve these results with basic software RAID card (like Highpoint Rocket RAID 6xx) and 4 cheap SSDs. And if you buy proper RAID controller (say Areca 1261ML) and plug anything between 4 and 16 small SSDs in RAID 0 or 10 you will simply trounce Revo in every possible way. While it is more expansive short term, you can always freely expand storage space with bigger SSDs without too much hassle. You can't do that with Revo.Honestly SSDs are still a premium product. And for a premium product Revo is not good enough. I would certainly buy Photofast GM-Powerdrive, not Revo. Of course it is more expansive (2.5x) but it offers twice the performance (PCI-Ex x8 not x4 like in RevoDrive), and full hardware RAID support from R0 to 60 (not some software rubbish from SilImg, brrr).
I like the idea of the FusionIO, but it is not for normal PC users. It is fine investment tho if you own gold mine, oil derrick, first name is $heikh, you are footballer, work for a mafia, or you are a banker. Take your pick! ;)
Chloiber - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
IMHO the RevoDrives are useless products. You gain nothing except high sequential bandwith, which most users never need.In REAL world applications, the CPU limits anyway in high IOPS scenarios. You won't see a big gain (if any) if you move from 1 Vertex 2 to 4 Vertex 2 in typical situations.
jonup - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Anand, this is not directly related with the article, but when do you expect the SSD prices to take a big hit? With the next generation of drives around the corner and talks of increased flash manufacturing capacities do you think it is reasonable to by and SSD (regardless of the interface) now simply from a $/GB prospective?Thanks,
J
theagentsmith - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Hey Anandcould you shed light on a annoying bug that's plaguing several but not all owners of Sandforce based SSDs?
It happens when there is not a lot of I/O activity, like when idle or light usage. The drive disappears and you see all the programs opened failing one at a time, until a couple of minutes later windows gives up with a BSOD. As the drive disappeared the kernel can't even write a memory dump, and if you press reset the drive isn't recognized by the BIOS, you have to cycle power to see it working again.
There is also a resume from sleep bug that however it's tolerable as you can use hibernation instead of sleep.
Here there is a topic on Corsair forums about this, they just released a 2.0 firmware but there is no change log and of course no word from Sandforce.
http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8...
mark53916 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
How do this and other SSDs handle the container files of encryptedand other virtual disks?
Typically, for best performance the container files should be stored
"densely" on the underlying device, but the space is always in
use.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
It is not on companies like OCZ to release a faster SSD controller. As I been saying for ages now, it is up to AMD/Intel to release an SSD controller integrated directly into the CPU. It makes as much sense as having an integrated memory controller. It's actually pretty much the same exact thing, except the memory is nonvolatile. It should be in the same form factor to reduce costs (keyed differently of course). ie, a 64GB SSD DIMM would cost half of a 64GB SSD. Perhaps even less.FunBunny2 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
The maths of SSD controllers aren't yet settled, which is why SandForce is different from Intel which is different from Indilinx and so forth. If the SSD controller is in the CPU case, you're stuck with it, unless you buy a new CPU. Hmmm. Frequent, planned, obsolescence; may be Intel will do it, then.larijoona - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Hello,I'm also intrested in seeing some benchmarks of virtual pc performance run from ssd!
jhbodle - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
I am not aware of any motherboard-integrated RAID controller that can handle the bandwidth of these 4 Sandforce SSDs. I use 3 X-25E's in RAID0 on the ICH10R, generally regarded as the best integrated RAID controller, and it is maxed at 660MB/sec.So I like this card and am pleased that companies such as OCZ are working on this kind of thing!
Chloiber - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Yep. ICH10R gets to 500-650MB/s - never seen more.It may be, that the ICH10R is connected via a 2GB/s-Bus or whatever, but that's theory. Or, the controller itself cannot handle more (which is a reasonable explanation - if you look at controllers from areca, they also max out at 1-2GB/s - and they are way more expensive).
sonofgodfrey - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
The LSI SAS controllers (which are on some server boards) can easily hit 1GB/s with 4 SSDs. Did this with the first generation Intel X-25M drives.me&er - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Anand,I've Secure Erased both Revo x2 and IBIS a number of times using hdparm.
Infact, it's my preferred method with all SSD.
Here's the methodology:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
Regards,
ezinner - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Argh! Why do motherboard and peripheral manufacturer's take so long to release port upgrades? They churn out new processors and chipsets all the time, but lag behind on interconnecting high speed devices. I am so sick of the USB 2.0, serial and parallel ports still found many motherboards. Give me USB 3 and the new Intel optical interface. First you have to mass market them, then devices will come out that supprt them. Give us faster lanes. Music vendors are even worse. Keyboards still were using floppy drives and scsi ports during the last decade and use slower, lower capacity sd-ram.Kevin G - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Chipsets are proprietary but high speed interconnects like SATA, USB ect. are industry standards which anyone can make devices for. Proprietary designs are easier to build as the designers know exactly the limited number of devices they interface with.The other issue with standards is that until chipsets include them, they'll incur an extra cost via an external chip for motherboard manufacturers. Thus even though the standard is complete and available, there will be some resistance for acceptance.
anon1234 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Does this card offer management of the RAID controller, i.e. can the RAID be turned off (JBOD mode)? There are a couple of scenarios where having 4 separate 'drives' is preferable to a single stripe set.Does TRIM still work if you do RAID/striping in software?
Spazweasel - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Don't underestimate the value of ease-of-installation. That can add up pretty quickly to even a moderate sized organization. If it only takes a couple of minutes to install or swap a drive-on-a-card, versus drive-in-a-HD-format, you can make up the premium in price quickly.wojtek240 - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
I somewhat liked the review but the ad and the review at the same time, its just a bit too much Ananad, credibility is still #1 for some folks.JarredWalton - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
Advertisements are from a completely separate company, and they're basically "randomly" selected. I say randomly in quotes because I'm not even sure of all the details--some company could buy all of the storage ad space for a month if they were so inclined. I've read many a magazine where an ad appears opposite a review, and in some cases those are very negative reviews.Any good (and smart) company keeps editorial staff separate from the advertising, and AnandTech operates that way. I can say with 100% honesty that no one has ever asked me to deal with advertising, and that never once has anyone suggested I give a better review to a product because they're "a big advertiser." In fact, I know of a couple instances where companies have threatened to pull advertising because of negative (or at least not glowing) reviews, and Anand pretty much said see you later.
Other than that, I'm not sure what in this article would undermine credibility based on the ads anyway, as my impression is more of a, "yeah, it works, and it's like RAID-0 with four SSDs only you use a single PCIe slot. It carries a price premium as well, secure erase can be iffy, TRIM doesn't work so you have to depend on idle garbage collection, and we encountered a bug on SandForce when writing lots of uncompressable data". That's definitely not enough for me to want to jump at the Revo X2, especially considering the price.
adonn78 - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
How much faster will it boot my PC over other SSD's or RAided drives? how long will it load a level of the 5 most popular games? Five us real world tangible statistics... IO's mean nothing to a gamer.krazyderek - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
the OCZ vertex 2 120gb x 2 seems to be lacking QD32 benchmarks to compare it at the same performance metric, also shouldn't OCZ vertex 2 120gb x 4 also been included since that's the apples to apples comparison to a revo drive x2 in terms of controller count??And for that matter, why isn't the original revodrive shown for reference aswell?
i'm blown away by the revodrive x2 unfortunately that's cause there aren't any other numbers to compare it too...
AnnonymousCoward - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
I couldn't find the PCIe gen in this article or the original RevoDrive one. Another site says it's PCIe 1. With all the talk about bandwidth, this is relevant. So PCIe 1 x4 = 1GB/s, and you used 804MB of that.Also, the charts are sort of hard to read with all the text and common colors; here's a way to improve it: http://i53.tinypic.com/3480bw4.png
Otherwise, good review. I think motherboards need to start including non-graphics multi-lane PCIe to accommodate high bandwidth drives.
Out of Box Experience - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
Give us some Real-World numbers for a worst case scenario!Running Windows XP-SP2 on one of these with XP partitions (Not Aligned) and ZERO SSD Tweeks, how fast can these drives copy and paste 1GB of data with over 1000 files in at least 100 directories
A vertex 2 can do it @ a meager 3.636MB / sec
A 2.5 inch 5400RPM WD Laptop drive is FASTER than a Vertex 2 in this type of test
A 7200RPM WD Desktop Drive is A LOT faster
SSD's are still CRAP at copying and pasting uncompressible data around on the sasme drive that its stored on
But they boot about as fast as my 300X Compact Flash
Thats something I guess
extide - Monday, November 8, 2010 - link
No, just the the drives optimally. Align it.That's like saying I am going to limit my HDD to PIO mode and bench it against another one in UDMA mode.
Pretty much assinine, I mean you can even fix an unaligned partition and move an unaligned one from an HDD to an SSD and make it aligned. It's not very hard...
thanared - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
I don't know how Anand does his test... but I have 2 revo drive 240 gb in a stripe on an i7 based asus super computer and i get 1028 MBytes per second.I break the revo drive stripe, stripe in windows, and align the drive.
thanared - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
Sorry.. using Iomter, 1 worker, 32 outstanding i/o per target, 128k sequentialFH123 - Saturday, November 6, 2010 - link
Anand, if you're investigating the real-world impact of the idle garbage collection bug, can you use a full-disk encryption product, such as Truecrypt? I believe even when you just initialise a TrueCrypt drive (the recommended slow version, not the quick), it fills every sector with random garbage for security purposes, which is presumably uncompressible. I suspect that, until such encryption products are written to interface with the TRIM command, they will cause you a real world problem right there and then, because they'll fill the disk with uncompressible data from the get-go. Remind us, do Sandforce implement full-drive encryption themselves, mitigating the need for programs like TrueCrypt when you want encryption?Something unrelated also springs to mind. You have previously slated Samsung SSDs for their relatively poor performance and - now I can't remember for sure, so correct me if I'm wrong - lack of TRIM. However I've read elsewhere that the later Samsung SSDs, e.g. since maybe a year ago or so, actually recognise when they are being formatted with an NTFS file system. This would theoretically allow them two things: (A) Automatically align the file system sector/cluster boundaries with SSD sectors and (B) Perform TRIM internally, because it understands NTFS and knows which sectors are empty. If true, then I think this is really quite smart. It avoids the need for TRIM altogether and should work across all Windows operating systems that use NTFS, even XP. The downside is, if Microsoft change NTFS in such a way as to break Samsung's understanding of it. That would, hypothetically, create an incompatibility with future Microsoft OSs.
x0rg - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
What if you just create a partition that is not using the full drive capacity, but 95%? would it help?