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24 Solid State Drives in RAID

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Sure beats the Pentium III@800 MHz with a 2.5 GB main HD and a 270MB HD I threw in as a "swap disk" the other day, to relieve the main HD from trashing.

However "defragging" SSD drives was totally n00bish (or they just did it for the heck of it).

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Maes said:

Sure beats the Pentium III@800 MHz with a 2.5 GB main HD and a 270MB HD I threw in as a "swap disk" the other day, to relieve the main HD from trashing.

I had a 1 GB HD in my P4 just for that. Without it, I don't think I could have played Doom3.

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caco_killer said:

How much would a system like that cost me?


Well...if you factor in $250 per SSD disk, and about $2000 for the box without a monitor (being quite generous here), you'd need a round $8000. Probably closer to $9000, as some parts like the dual graphic cards and the 1000W PSUs are ridicolously overpriced and probably cost $1000 a pair on their own.

If you wish to "just" play games with high FPS and all, you can do with a fraction of that cost, since the 24 SSD drives in RAID won't actually add much (if at all) to a game's FPS (unless it eats up so much RAM that not even 4 GB are enough to play without continuous trashing).

Csonicgo said:

I had a 1 GB HD in my P4 just for that. Without it, I don't think I could have played Doom3.


I always thought that this would be an ideal use for an old or too small HD, assuming of course it can work in UDMA mode, since falling back to PIO mode would kinda defeat the purpose.

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He says "Over 2GB a second", but the screen shows 2019 MB/sec, which is actually about 29MB slower than 2GB/sec :P

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No - it's still 2-3 orders of magnitude slower.

MikeRS said:

He says "Over 2GB a second", but the screen shows 2019 MB/sec, which is actually about 29MB slower than 2GB/sec :P

Depends on whether you're talking decimal or binary Gigs.

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GreyGhost said:

No - it's still 2-3 orders of magnitude slower.


And will always stay as slow due to the different physical mechanisms used in either case. Suuure, even tape streamers eventually surpassed hard disks in transfer speed alone (if you consider IDE hard disks vs UltrSCSI streamers), but hard disks moved along, too.


Depends on whether you're talking decimal or binary Gigs.


Who knows, he might actually be quoting megabits ;-)

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I didn't bother writing MiB or GiB because I figured everyone would know what I meant, but I suppose that's the whole reason those separate prefixes exist. ~_~

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Zaldron said:
The SI has ruled that Gigabyte means exactly what it means when Giga is suffixed to any other quantity: 10^9.

You're talking about Gibibytes.

And I've ruled that "gibi" sounds dumb and therefore a gigabyte is equal to 2^30 bytes.

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Maes said:

Well...if you factor in $250 per SSD disk, and about $2000 for the box without a monitor (being quite generous here), you'd need a round $8000. Probably closer to $9000, as some parts like the dual graphic cards and the 1000W PSUs are ridicolously overpriced and probably cost $1000 a pair on their own.


Drives at that speed are going to run you closer to thousands of dollars a piece.

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raptir said:

Drives at that speed are going to run you closer to thousands of dollars a piece.


I don't think so. Current prices are 2$ per GB and dropping for that kind of drives, so maybe $500 per drive but not 1000s.

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You have to remember that they're using top of the line drives. IIRC those aren't even commercially available, they're prototype drives that Samsung sent to these guys with the sole purpose of showing off how fast they are.

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The 2 GB/sec speed is due to many drives working in parallel in the RAID configuration, not due to each drive being particularly fast on its own. To be precise, no single SATA-II drive can ever exceed the maximum SATA-II speed, which is 3 Gbit/sec.

24 drives.. 2 GB/sec... it all factors down to a bit more than 80 MB/sec per drive or roughly 640 Mbit/sec/drive, which is not even half the SATA-I speed, and is achievable even with IDE hard disks from some time now.

So, nothing exceptional about the drives themselves here.

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That's true... in the ideal case. However you do lose a ton of performance due to using them in parallel. It's not like you're going to get 80MBps out of one drive and 160 out of two.

Either way, I actually did a research project for my nanotechnology class and looked into the background of that video, recently. I don't have my sources handy, but those are prototype drives that you cannot buy.

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raptir said:

Either way, I actually did a research project for my nanotechnology class and looked into the background of that video, recently. I don't have my sources handy, but those are prototype drives that you cannot buy.


From the video alone, there doesn't seem to be anything exceptional in the drives themselves. Maybe the particular model is not for sale yet, but there doesn't seem to be anything groundbreaking in the drives alone.

The parallel SATA configuration is responsible for the "bulk" 2GB/sec speed (which is way lower than the maximum theoretical of 24 x 3 Gbps = 72 Gbps = 9 Gbps, so just a little less than 25% parallel efficiency).

Low seek times? Even rocks know that any SSD is orders of magnitude faster than an electromechanical hard disk in that area.

If anything, I'd like to see what SATA controllers they are using to actually make the array usable. I doubt an onboard Intel or Via "RAID" controller with an internal PCI bus could work with so many drives, let alone handle such speeds from and to memory!

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