OCZ v2 SSD's Work Just Fine!

doc

doc

doc

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I have been doing some research for work and thought I would share with you one set of benchmarks you might like. This is not completely original, the "Battleship Mtron" (Google it) used the same card, but slower drives.

Rig is expensive for desktop use, but nothing particularly special:

AMD Phenom 9950 CPU
Foxconn Destroyer Mobo
4GB Corsair DDR2
Areca 1231 RAID Card (IOP341@800Mhz)
8 x OCZ v2 32GB

Results though are pretty stunning: :eek:


e9z135.jpg


2r41kxd.jpg


1y3cht.jpg



The RAID card gets capped out coincidentally around 800mb/s which is roughly consistent with other results where Max mb/s = Mhz of processor. If it is any consolation, you can get the same results with 5 drives, I just filled it up with what I had. The really weird thing is that while using the system it feels just as fast with two drives! :) Also, the latest Intel drives would max out this card at about 4 drives!

I have some other RAID cards to try, including one which initially demonstrated over 1000mb/s! But these are the most consistent results so far.

The important point for those who are still reading, is that all my results so far have demonstrated the the current generation of RAID cards cannot keep up with Solid State technology. When SSD's get cheaper and we are all looking for 3rd party RAID cards, the market is going to be very expensive! :)

Not very practical/affordable for your average gaming rig, but nice to see :)
 
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John24 said:
OCZ v2 SSD's Work Just Fine... with a raid card.
Click to expand...

Indeed, the real trick in this pony is:-

Areca 1231 RAID Card

Nice numbers though, surely with 8 drives the CPU on the RAID card must be hammered.

What would 8x spinning disc look like, I think we need a comparison?

Found this:-

12disk8mbnw3.png


lay-z-boy said:
12x 15k sas drives in raid 0
Click to expand...

So speed wise the SSD's look like they're cooking with gas :)

HEADRAT
 
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doc said:
Results though are pretty stunning
*snip*
Not very practical/affordable for your average gaming rig, but nice to see :)
Click to expand...

That 800MB/sec pushed my buy button.. until I realised you had 8 drives in - that's only 50MB/sec. Which indicates MLC.. so the number of writes I'm looking todo would shorten drive life however in the short term an MLC may be very good for reading the video for testing hmm... I may look at the Intel ones.. but that's additional memory price territory.
 
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NickK said:
That 800MB/sec pushed my buy button.. until I realised you had 8 drives in - that's only 50MB/sec. Which indicates MLC.. so the number of writes I'm looking todo would shorten drive life however in the short term an MLC may be very good for reading the video for testing hmm... I may look at the Intel ones.. but that's additional memory price territory.
Click to expand...

You can get the same benchmark speed results with only 5 drives before you reach the limit of the RAID card. This equates to 150mb/s each. The drives are supposed to do 170mb/s but I have only seen that on an entry level RAID card (Areca 1220) which caps out after only 3 drives.

If you are concerned with system usability then 2 drives feels just as snappy and responsive as 5, although obviously drive throughput is reduced.

Note that this is with a very expensive RAID card that is aimed at Enterprise infrastructure, not a desktop system!
 
doc said:
The drives are supposed to do 170mb/s but I have only seen that on an entry level RAID card (Areca 1220) which caps out after only 3 drives.
Click to expand...

So you could get 510MB/sec from a Areca 1220 and 3* OCZ SSD?

That might be an interesting and cheaper option for some?

HEADRAT
 
Some great numbers there, thanks for sharing.

I read that the "I/O drive" was around $2400 for 80gb iirc, but now they have increased the price a lot but havent said how much it would be, as i think there targeting more high end business use, but they are making a more mainstream SSD which i think will be a little slower but cheaper.

Cant wait for this tech to become more affordable so we can start using it for are gaming rigs.
 
HEADRAT said:
So you could get 510MB/sec from a Areca 1220 and 3* OCZ SSD?

That might be an interesting and cheaper option for some?

HEADRAT
Click to expand...

Yes, but the 1220 runs at a lower clock speed and caps out at about 400mb/s so you never get the full benefit from the 3rd drive. "Battleship Mtron" (Google it) explains this a lot better than I can.

EDIT: Thinking about it again on the 1231, the 5th drive does not run at full speed, so the "average" is actually a little more than 150mb/s.

However, the Areca RAID cards are not cheap even at the entry level so I would be interested to see how the Adaptec cards compare......
 
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OldComputerGuy7 said:
Some great numbers there, thanks for sharing.

I read that the "I/O drive" was around $2400 for 80gb iirc, but now they have increased the price a lot but havent said how much it would be, as i think there targeting more high end business use, but they are making a more mainstream SSD which i think will be a little slower but cheaper.

Cant wait for this tech to become more affordable so we can start using it for are gaming rigs.
Click to expand...

What is becoming more and more affordable for smaller applications is RAM caches. Basically you put 4x2GB RAM into your desktop machine and then use something like Superspeed Volume Cache to create a shadow copy of a small partition in RAM (eg: 4-5GB). You cannot boot from it, but it does make specific apps very fast once Windows has loaded.....
 
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