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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 :)

SSD RAIDS...

Don't get the Evo drives if you plan to raid. They perform well individually but not in raid. BTW Crucial is Micron which is the major MLC manufacturer in the World.
 
Another vote against the EVO drives for your application Will. They're manufactured using TLC NAND which has a lower write endurance. Perfectly fine if it's for consumer application but being that it sounds like you plan on moving a lot more data across them (using them as scratch disks etc), you may find that go through that write endurance rating faster than a typical consumer. The Pro's are MLC NAND which should have a longer life :)
 
AH, good to know. Thanks for helping out. So Samsung's 840 Pro are the way to go?

I was also looking at the Crutial M500s for this RAID 0 application.

Brad Allen said:
Another vote against the EVO drives for your application Will. They're manufactured using TLC NAND which has a lower write endurance. Perfectly fine if it's for consumer application but being that it sounds like you plan on moving a lot more data across them (using them as scratch disks etc), you may find that go through that write endurance rating faster than a typical consumer. The Pro's are MLC NAND which should have a longer life :)
Click to expand...
 
Follow the money

Follow the money

Eric and Brad both recommended against the EVO versions of the Samsung 840s for RAID and/or heavy usage. I had a guy who builds SSD RAIDs tell me the opposite, that the EVO version was the first SSD he had been able to get decent reliability out of. I wonder if someone has engineered an SSD/TRIM friendly RAID protocol?

Maybe he was just blowing smoke, it was a trade show after all, but he seemed genuinely pumped up about what the Samsung 840 EVO SSDs would do in a RAID vs old school SSDs.

IAC, if anyone knows the dealio please share. No offense intended to Brad or Eric, just looking for the latest intel.

The potential of SSD RAIDs - especially as the prices fall - will be very tempting for a lot of use cases. I'd think the SSD and RAID controller vendors (some of whom are likely owned by the same parent corporation) would be busy engineering a protocol that would allow the RAID controller to manage the TRIM function across the set. You'd also want more throughput per channel so the controller can go up to 2TB/s with only 4 drives in the set, something that wasn't a design priority for spinning drive based RAIDs where the road to high throughput was more channels/platters.

IAC, if there's money to be made..., just sayin'

BTW, I'd love a compact (pocket sized? Cargo pants maybe?) single 2.5" drive enclosure with TB2 I can put 1TB SSDs in. Can't seem to get over 300MB/s using USB3, should be able to hit 500MB/s R/W on the EVOs - so I'm throwing the bus, under the bus (sorry, couldn't resist ;-)...

Cheers - #19
 
There are SATA to USB 3.0 cable.

Blair S. Paulsen said:
Eric and Brad both recommended against the EVO versions of the Samsung 840s for RAID and/or heavy usage. I had a guy who builds SSD RAIDs tell me the opposite, that the EVO version was the first SSD he had been able to get decent reliability out of. I wonder if someone has engineered an SSD/TRIM friendly RAID protocol?

Maybe he was just blowing smoke, it was a trade show after all, but he seemed genuinely pumped up about what the Samsung 840 EVO SSDs would do in a RAID vs old school SSDs.

IAC, if anyone knows the dealio please share. No offense intended to Brad or Eric, just looking for the latest intel.

The potential of SSD RAIDs - especially as the prices fall - will be very tempting for a lot of use cases. I'd think the SSD and RAID controller vendors (some of whom are likely owned by the same parent corporation) would be busy engineering a protocol that would allow the RAID controller to manage the TRIM function across the set. You'd also want more throughput per channel so the controller can go up to 2TB/s with only 4 drives in the set, something that wasn't a design priority for spinning drive based RAIDs where the road to high throughput was more channels/platters.

IAC, if there's money to be made..., just sayin'

BTW, I'd love a compact (pocket sized? Cargo pants maybe?) single 2.5" drive enclosure with TB2 I can put 1TB SSDs in. Can't seem to get over 300MB/s using USB3, should be able to hit 500MB/s R/W on the EVOs - so I'm throwing the bus, under the bus (sorry, couldn't resist ;-)...

Cheers - #19
Click to expand...
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
Eric and Brad both recommended against the EVO versions of the Samsung 840s for RAID and/or heavy usage. I had a guy who builds SSD RAIDs tell me the opposite, that the EVO version was the first SSD he had been able to get decent reliability out of. I wonder if someone has engineered an SSD/TRIM friendly RAID protocol?

Maybe he was just blowing smoke, it was a trade show after all, but he seemed genuinely pumped up about what the Samsung 840 EVO SSDs would do in a RAID vs old school SSDs.

IAC, if anyone knows the dealio please share. No offense intended to Brad or Eric, just looking for the latest intel.
Click to expand...

No offence taken at all Blair. Perhaps, I jumped the gun a little and am being a little too conservative when it comes to write endurance of the EVO drives. I'm mostly basing it off the fact that they are consumer/mainstream targeted drives. How Will intends to use the drives on a day to day basis, will drastically affect whether or not write endurance becomes a problem. If you're interested Blair, I find Anandtech a very reliable source of information. I've linked their review of the latest EVO drives, and specifically their section on Endurance: http://anandtech.com/show/7173/sams...w-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested/3

They also just published their latest SSD recommendations split into various segments which might be worth checking out too :)
http://anandtech.com/show/7545/best-ssds-holiday-2013

It's probably worth also mentioning for people reading along that when talking about reliability in terms of write endurance on SDD's, this isn't reliability in terms of an SDD being flakey or doing it's job incorrectly. Write endurance refers to the natural end of life for all SDD's. There is only so many times the cells within the NAND on an SSD can be written to and then erased, and then written to, and then erased etc. Without getting too technical, different types of NAND handle these erase/write cycles better than others. In the case of the EVO drives, they use a type of NAND (TLC) which has amongst the lowest erase/write cycles - that is, low write endurance. Typically, this isn't a problem in consumer applications because the amount of data being written and erased is typically very low (usually <20GB/day), and so people will still get years and years of use out of the drive before it has exhausted all of it's NAND write/erase cycles. However, in applications where potentially hundreds of GB's (or even TB's) of data might be written on a daily basis, the drives can chew through this process much faster and reach their end of life before expected. For example, I would expect a RAID array of SSDs being used as a Render Cache for Resolve or other color grading systems would find itself writing and erasing hundreds of gigs worth of DPX sequences on a daily basis. Every time a change is made, these changes start being rendered and getting written to the drives. In those applications, I would be definitely trying to choose SSD's that have MLC NAND, or even SLC if money is of no concern whatsoever.

I'm unsure personally of how the EVO's rate for their RAIDing ability - so I can't really add any info on that side of things sorry Blair :(
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
Eric and Brad both recommended against the EVO versions of the Samsung 840s for RAID and/or heavy usage. I had a guy who builds SSD RAIDs tell me the opposite, that the EVO version was the first SSD he had been able to get decent reliability out of. I wonder if someone has engineered an SSD/TRIM friendly RAID protocol?
Click to expand...


Depends on the type of RAIDs. I've personally never tried the EVO drives, can't comment on them, but they're not really meant for RAID use anyway. RAID-0 works fine with most off the shelf performance SSDs, provided you pick a block sizing that matches well with the SSD and provided you don't write to the same portions of the SSD media too often, but tend to spread out your write activity -- as in fill it up or most of the way before you start to clear and re-write.

I would still not recommend most of the desktop class SSDs for RAID use, even the Samsung 840, which is one of my all-time favorite SSDs. One really needs to go with an "enterprise" or RAID purposed SSD here to get the best and most reliable results. If you plan to run RAID-5 or other parity-enabled RAID setup, it's imperative that you use the right kind of SSD. OWC makes SSDs with RAID use in mind and they're just OK. When it comes to RAIDs, take a look at Toshiba SSD's. Seriously, they're really good.

Personally, I'm still not quite sure I understand the allure of SSDs for RAID use. The first thing most people find, especially on larger RAID volumes or parity arrays is that the write times are no better, even worse at times, than HDD based RAIDs. Combine that with the cost and low capacity, it just doesn't add up to anything good. Even with the speed promises… And HDD RAIDs will deliver all the performance you realistically need if you put the right pieces together.

For a time I was really trying to build some SSD RAIDs and doing a lot of testing, but I kinda lost interest and gave up after spending too much time and money on it. Haven't really dabbled that much with it in the past year. I was mostly looking for solutions to go in field use DIT kits, rugged all-in-one cases that had complete DIT setups. Would be nice to slot in 6 x 1TB SSD's in a RAID-5 in a thin, waterproof case built around a MBP Retina. 3 SSDs would saturate a Thunderbolt port for read times, in theory -- took 4 in practice, 5 for RAID-5. In the end, I just couldn't get the economics to work out. And as far as ergonomics go, external HDD/ SSDs or small HDD RAIDs proved to be the best option in a case of their own and we keep the MBPr in a backpack.

For desktop use or on a decent cart, I say HDD all the way. 8 x HDDs will give you 18TB of RAID-5 formatted capacity using 3TB drives, super reliable performance and should be cheaper than an array made out of 4+ SSDs. And it will still deliver 1000MB/s. Plenty fast enough for anything R3D related, even Dragon footage.
 
I have tested these SSD's lately in raid configuration and the M500 so far are giving the results both for read and write instructions. The Evo's only test 600MB/s in raid 0 where as the M500 tested 1GB/s.
 
I'm not sure why you'd need SSD RAID.
I have an 8-bay 2-port miniSAS enclosure ($600), filled with 3TB Seagate drives (~$100), connected to a RAID card ($300), and in RAID5, I get around 1100MB/s read and write...and the array is half full.
That's 19 TB useable space that's redundant, very fast, and inexpensive.
 
Hi Nick, which raid card are you using? Thanks.
 
http://www.newertech.com/products/maxpower_6g2e.php
I had some reservations about this card, at first. After a few months of thrashing the array, no real problems thus far. It's only $280. With the performance I'm seeing, I have no reason to jump to an ATTO R680 or the like.
 
Nick Timmons said:
I'm not sure why you'd need SSD RAID.
I have an 8-bay 2-port miniSAS enclosure ($600), filled with 3TB Seagate drives (~$100), connected to a RAID card ($300), and in RAID5, I get around 1100MB/s read and write...and the array is half full.
That's 19 TB useable space that's redundant, very fast, and inexpensive.
Click to expand...

Nick, are u running the Stardom Sohotank ST8-U5 ?

Thanks.

- M
 
Tell us more!

Eric Bowen said:
I have tested these SSD's lately in raid configuration and the M500 so far are giving the results both for read and write instructions. The Evo's only test 600MB/s in raid 0 where as the M500 tested 1GB/s.
Click to expand...
 
Boot speed, sharpness and responsiveness in Mac OS X finder.

Nick Timmons said:
I'm not sure why you'd need SSD RAID.
Click to expand...

I'm replacing my Apple RAID card to free a PCIe slot. I'm going to dump the 3 x 15,000 rpm drives with it. So I want a faster start up. Fast program loading and responsiveness and over 500MB/s uncompressed read and write speeds.

How fast does a HDD RAID 0 boot?
How fast does a single SSD boot?
How fast does a SSD RAID 0 boot?

What about program loading and NLE's rendering?

Saving myself these little seconds here and there in a day adds to productivity. There's only 24 hours in a day and I'm up most of those.
 
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Damn! 1100MB/s?!?!

I have the Caldigit HDONE. 12 TB of storage and it's only doing 400-500. I thought I had an awesome setup. Would you please detail what specifically you have going on for those reading along and myself?

Thanks.

Nick Timmons said:
I
I have an 8-bay 2-port miniSAS enclosure ($600), filled with 3TB Seagate drives (~$100), connected to a RAID card ($300), and in RAID5, I get around 1100MB/s read and write...and the array is half full.
That's 19 TB useable space that's redundant, very fast, and inexpensive.
Click to expand...
 
Internal HDD options.

On a 2009 Mac Pro (4,1)

4x 3TB Baracuda dives. I hear these are the best.
What kind of speeds can I expect with this RAID 0?
How fast is the start up time?
How fast does Premiere load?
Does the HDD RAID 0 effect render times?
 
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1400474

Can anyone confirm that 660MB/s is the max any internal RAID or single dive can achieve in a RAID 0 using the internal bays of the Mac Pro?

"ICH chip which throttles down @ 650mb/sec or so"
Schismz
macrumors regular


Join Date: Sep 2010

"The SATA interface used affects speed: the internal Mac Pro Nehalem (2009) SATA ports max-out around ~600 MB/sec."
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-SSD-OWC-Mercury_Extreme-RAID.html

No sense in buying the fastest SSDs and RAIDing them if I'm limited by the chipset, right?

2009 Mac Pro (4,1)
 
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Will Keir said:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1400474

Can anyone confirm that 660MB/s is the max any internal RAID or single dive can achieve in a RAID 0 using the internal bays of the Mac Pro?

"ICH chip which throttles down @ 650mb/sec or so"
Schismz
macrumors regular
Click to expand...

Um.. Not exactly. There is a limit, but it's closer to 900MB/s. Or at least that's the case with the chipset, some things change based on which CPUs are paired up. If you have "Westmere" core Xeons, you will get the full ~900MB/s or so bandwidth. "Nehalem" Xeons may suffer, I don't recall off the top of my head, but it seems that's what the guy at Mac Performance Guide is trying to say. Although at a quick skim-through, his numbers don't seem to reflect a 600MB/s speed cap, nor does he take into account that it could be his OWC SSD's. And like many SSD's of 3.5+ years ago, their state-change and transaction cycling were pretty slow. Much of his performance hit could be coming from waiting for those SSDs to close their transactions.

The 4 internal drive bays in a Mac Pro are independent at full bandwidth. They are 3Gbps each, so real-world performance is going to top out at about 250MB/s for each bay. So the most you're going to get is 1000MB/s of real-world speed under the most ideal conditions. These SATA channels, as well as those in the optical bays, of the Mac Pro 4,1 ~ 5,1 are all part of the I/O Control Hub within the North Bridge if the i55xx series Xeon platform. This isn't a Mac Pro issue, it's just an aspect of implementation within that era of these Xeon systems. There technically is no speed crippling cap of sorts, but the control hub does incur some overhead. Intel basically tried to incorporate too much stuff into one central control. They still do this on the newer Xeons, but it has greatly improved.

If memory serves, the '08 Mac Pro and that prior generation of Xeons had a more restrictive ICH and any RAID there would top out at about 600MB/s or so. Back then, we really didn't have a way to make internal 4-drive RAIDs that fast anyway.

You can put SSD's in each bay and make a RAID-0 array. Not sure what speeds you'll see. Each bay is going to top out at about 250MB/s read, give or take a few MB/s and then the RAID-0 composite will be some total of that, less a small percentage of overhead for the ICH, software RAID implementation, but mostly it will be determined by how your chosen drives or SSDs handle the data and at what block sizing you choose.

I would recommend the 3TB HDDs as well. The Seagate Barracudas are good, so are the WD Black drives. Best are probably the RE4 "Enterprise/ RAID" edition WD drives, followed by the Seagates. The latter being more popular lately because they perform well and at a much lower price. Hitachi UltraStar Enterprise drives are also good, but I haven't been able to get the performance out of them that I get with the WD RE4's and they're actually more expensive than the RE4's.

Join Date: Sep 2010

"The SATA interface used affects speed: the internal Mac Pro Nehalem (2009) SATA ports max-out around ~600 MB/sec."
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-SSD-OWC-Mercury_Extreme-RAID.html

No sense in buying the fastest SSDs and RAIDing them if I'm limited by the chipset, right?

2009 Mac Pro (4,1)
Click to expand...

While I don't agree with those numbers and it seems like they're applying old info and we're looking at old SSD tech. However, given that under the most ideal circumstances, you're going to top out at 1000MB/s or less, I would recommend the HDD RAID. It's going to be cheaper and much larger. And for straight-up read performance, the HDD Raid is going to get you to about 580MB/s anyway, which is a limitation of the drives themselves. I'm seeing about 570~580 MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes in a Mac Pro 5,1 using 3TB RE4 WD drives.

For the OS and applications, put an SSD for that in an optical bay and run from there. First off, you don't want your OS and apps interfering with performance on your RAID volume. Second, the RAID may be fast, but it takes time to initialize. A decent SSD will boot your Mac in 15 seconds or so. A fast RAID will do the same, after you lose 15 seconds or so to initialization and the drives spinning up. My 3.06GHz 12-core with a Samsung 830 512GB SSD for OS/apps boots in about 16 seconds or so. App loading is pretty snappy. The SSD speed is not typically the bottleneck when loading apps. Everything else runs fine, if you're finding sluggishness while working in finder or whatever, chances are you have something else going on or need more RAM.
 
I boot off a 960GB SSD... booting off RAID seems pointless, to me. Added boot time, complexity, and I don't keep anything on my SSD that I can't afford to lose.
Yes, I'm using the 8-bay miniSAS SoHoTank. Bought it off a DIT in LA, used.
Not much else to speak of in my setup. Windows 7 Pro on an HP Z820. I found it necessary to disable to integrated LSI RAID controller on the motherboard to avoid hangs on boot.
Boot of SSD, store shit on RAID.
What else would you like to know?
 
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