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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Is it possible to Raid SSD drives together?

D

doondoon

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If I understood correctly Silverado Systems is raiding Intel X-25 SSD drives together on the souped up macs they're building. I think the OS and applications are living on the raided SSD's in their configuration.

Apparently Intel is going to be releasing a 320GB SSD in the coming months.

My question is: lets say four of these SSD drives were raided together how fast would they be and could they compete with other fast raids for the purpose of cutting and grading RED footage... or perhaps other high bandwidth footage?

Seems like the SSD's would be very safe from fault or crash... and if the speed is there maybe a great solution.
 
Operating systems that run off of RAID see nearly triple to 4x performance increase. My laptop from two years ago beats the crap out of any newer Laptop with an 2.5" Sata Drive, ever since I installed a 64GB SSD. Boot time is under 8 seconds, and every App opens within milliseconds. It never crashes from I/O, and doesn't get anywhere near as Hot. And this is ONE SSD.... I can easily see x4 SSD's in a RAID 0 being faster than 8 Drives 3.5" 7200 RPM drives. I'm only waiting for the Prices to drop to buy more of these. The 128GB 200MB/s are around $250 each.

SSD's are investments, Buying ANY 3.5" Hard Drive(especially external) is NOT an investment.
 
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Alex Carr said:
Operating systems that run off of RAID see nearly triple to 4x performance increase. My laptop from two years ago beats the crap out of any newer Laptop with an 2.5" Sata Drive, ever since I installed a 64GB SSD. Boot time is under 8 seconds, and every App opens within milliseconds. It never crashes from I/O, and doesn't get anywhere near as Hot. And this is ONE SSD.... I can easily see x4 SSD's in a RAID 0 being faster than 8 Drives 3.5" 7200 RPM drives. I'm only waiting for the Prices to drop to buy more of these. The 128GB 200MB/s are around $250 each.

SSD's are investments, Buying ANY 3.5" Hard Drive(especially external) is NOT an investment.
Click to expand...

So if one SSD drive is reading at 200MB/s then what is the factor of increased speed once raided together?
 
Doondoon,

We've found the sweet spot is around 600 MB/s with three SSD's raided together in a RAID 0 config.

Performance per drive seems to fall off a little under 10.5 with four drives. However, we haven't tested under 10.6 yet and performance may go back up.

Torrey
-----------------------------------------------
Torrey Loomis
President & CEO - Silverado Systems, Inc.
(916) 760-0032 • FAX (916) 404-5258
torrey@silverado.cc
http://www.Silverado.cc

Silverado Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/silveradosys
StudioBuilder blog at http://silveradosys.blogspot.com
 
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torster said:
Doondoon,

We've found the sweet spot is around 600 MB/s with three SSD's raided together in a RAID 0 config.

Performance per drive seems to fall off a little under 10.5 with four drives. However, we haven't tested under 10.6 yet and performance may go back up.

Torrey
-----------------------------------------------
Torrey Loomis
President & CEO - Silverado Systems, Inc.
(916) 760-0032 • FAX (916) 404-5258
torrey@silverado.cc
http://www.Silverado.cc

Silverado Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/silveradosys
StudioBuilder blog at http://silveradosys.blogspot.com
Click to expand...



Thanks for the info Torrey.

A few questions if you please:

1. I'm curious which Intel SSD drives are you using? The "m" or the "e" and what are the differences ?

2. Also, how many GB is the raid?

3. Lastly, do SSD's crash? Is there a downside to them (other than cost/size) ?

I look forward to hearing how one of your raided SSD systems runs on SL.

I was actually having a drive repaired the other day and the specialist said that SSD's do crash and when they do retrieving data from them is extremely difficult.... any thoughts or experience with this?


thanks so much.
 
Alex Carr said:
SSD's are investments, Buying ANY 3.5" Hard Drive(especially external) is NOT an investment.
Click to expand...

I'm as much of an SSD fan as the next guy (probably more), but a) I wouldn't exactly call something that will probably be half the price in 12 months an "investment" and b) SSD is still vastly too expensive for the sort of bulk data storage anyone who owns a Red probably needs to do.

Storing an hour of Red footage on an SSD is going to consume on the order of $230 worth of drive space (and that's with more affordable SSD options), as compared with about $10 worth of drive space on a 1.5 TB 3.5" drive.

Putting an SSD, maybe even an SSD RAID, in your database server is a great idea. Putting your system and your apps on an SSD is a great idea. Editing video from one... not such a great idea at the moment. You're paying upwards of 20x as much per gigabyte of storage, and SSD's largest strength, its vastly faster random access, doesn't really matter for video editing, which consists almost entirely of sequential disk access.
 
You didnt really understand the context of what I'm trying to explain. What do you need 800MB/s for to offline edit?? The Offline systems need SSD's for OS drives, not Edit Drives. Transport Drives need to be SSD, From the Set to Post.

A 90 minute Feature is 1.3 TB = 6 256 SSD's. Way fast enough to Print HDCAM SR 444. This is Not 16 Drives. It compares in value and is a great investment. I could hook those 6 SSD's off my motherboard. But You need additional Cards, Enclosures, and Cables to RAID 16 drives together not to mention the extra COST!!! When they get cheaper they will be an even better investment than they are now! Its not about size, its about speed.
 
doondoon said:
Thanks for the info Torrey.

1. I'm curious which Intel SSD drives are you using? The "m" or the "e" and what are the differences ?
2. Also, how many GB is the raid?
3. Lastly, do SSD's crash? Is there a downside to them (other than cost/size) ?
I look forward to hearing how one of your raided SSD systems runs on SL.
I was actually having a drive repaired the other day and the specialist said that SSD's do crash and when they do retrieving data from them is extremely difficult.... any thoughts or experience with this?
Click to expand...

Doondoon,

We're using the Intel X-25M drives. Bigger capacity and better value.

The RAID 0 with three drives is about 480 GB prior to format.

I would agree that recovery from an SSD is very different than recovering from a disk-based drive. While it probably can happen, we've have yet to have a crash on any of the Intel SSD's we are running. I still do Time Machine backup just in case.

Torrey
 
For what it's worth, I've found it quite easy to burn up most SSDs in RAID-5, and in some cases a RAID-0, to where they only last a matter of weeks or a month or two before errors start to appear. The Intel X-25 are the best of the bunch, I have actually only had one unit go bad and it did almost right away, so it was most likely defective. The OCZ Velocity SSDs seem to have a self-destruct mechanism built right in. But they keep swapping them out under warranty... Right now, for anyone using SSDs as a system drive or for critical storage, especially if you want to do a RAID, the only SSD I would recommend would be the Intel X-25M. Yes, they are fast. I have 4 of them inside a small "cube" PC, one is the system drive, the other 3 are a RAID-0. I still don't feel they provide better security than typical HDDs. But I don't worry about them getting bumped the same way. I still follow the same sort of backup practices I would if they were regular HDDs.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
For what it's worth, I've found it quite easy to burn up most SSDs in RAID-5, and in some cases a RAID-0, to where they only last a matter of weeks or a month or two before errors start to appear. The Intel X-25 are the best of the bunch, I have actually only had one unit go bad and it did almost right away, so it was most likely defective. The OCZ Velocity SSDs seem to have a self-destruct mechanism built right in. But they keep swapping them out under warranty... Right now, for anyone using SSDs as a system drive or for critical storage, especially if you want to do a RAID, the only SSD I would recommend would be the Intel X-25M. Yes, they are fast. I have 4 of them inside a small "cube" PC, one is the system drive, the other 3 are a RAID-0. I still don't feel they provide better security than typical HDDs. But I don't worry about them getting bumped the same way. I still follow the same sort of backup practices I would if they were regular HDDs.
Click to expand...

Jeff do you have any experience with the "e" series Intel SSD's? If I'm understanding what Intel says on their site, the "e" series are being advertised for enterprise class servers and workstations. So is it reasonable for me to assume in some way the "e" class drives are more robust /stable than the "m" class drives?
 
torster said:
Doondoon,

We're using the Intel X-25M drives. Bigger capacity and better value.

The RAID 0 with three drives is about 480 GB prior to format.

I would agree that recovery from an SSD is very different than recovering from a disk-based drive. While it probably can happen, we've have yet to have a crash on any of the Intel SSD's we are running. I still do Time Machine backup just in case.

Torrey
Click to expand...

Torrey.

thanks so much for the info.

: )

I'm looking into a new system here in the next month or so and am seriously considering raiding a few of these drives for the OS to live on.
 
doondoon said:
I'm looking into a new system here in the next month or so and am seriously considering raiding a few of these drives for the OS to live on.
Click to expand...

Doondoon,

Standby for your system to be wicked fast...

:-)

Torrey
 
They did that with raiding a bunch of samsung drives if i remember rightly, the system like Torrey said, wicked fast...it was on vista too...so...imagine snow leopard with those raided together...
Truly a dream system (not taking into account the capacity)...
 
Imran Farouk said:
Truly a dream system (not taking into account the capacity)...
Click to expand...

Imran,

We'll see SSD's go mainstream on capacity (or mostly so) when X-25 hits 320 GB each later this year.

Torrey
 
doondoon said:
Jeff do you have any experience with the "e" series Intel SSD's? If I'm understanding what Intel says on their site, the "e" series are being advertised for enterprise class servers and workstations. So is it reasonable for me to assume in some way the "e" class drives are more robust /stable than the "m" class drives?
Click to expand...

Not yet. Like HDD's, the "enterprise" class models will most likely be physically the same units as the other M SSD drives. So I'd imagine they're the same in terms of the FLASH chips and memory controllers as the M series units. But I would expect the E series to have different firmware and performance tuning to work better in performance environments / RAID configurations. That's mostly speculation, though until I get my hands on one or get more info. On the surface (and for spec sheets / whitepapers), they look the same but the E series has a better warranty and costs a bit more, they're harder to locate and buy too.
 
torster said:
Imran,

We'll see SSD's go mainstream on capacity (or mostly so) when X-25 hits 320 GB each later this year.

Torrey
Click to expand...

I still haven't heard anything on the difference between the "m" series and the "e" series Intel SSD's. If I'm reading the Intel site correctly they're claiming slightly faster speeds on the "e" as well as a slightly more robust build.

Torrey can you comment on the difference between the two? The "e" series are smaller capacity and more expensive but if they are indeed faster and safer perhaps this would be the way to go?

thanks in advance.
 
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