OCZ's Fastest SSD, The IBIS and HSDL Interface Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 29, 2010 12:01 AM ESTNo TRIM, but Garbage Collection
The IBIS drive features a four-controller internal RAID, and there’s currently no way to pass TRIM along to drives in a RAID array, which means its very important to have a resilient controller. OCZ stuck with SandForce and the SF-1200, the most resilient controller on the market today. To make things better however the drive supports idle time garbage collection. With an active NTFS partition on the drive, no IO activity and sufficient free space, the controllers will begin cleaning up the NAND. The effect is profound, below we have a clean drive:
Now, after we've filled the drive and tortured it with random writes:
Note that peak low queue-depth read speed dropped from ~233MB/s down to 120MB/s. Now here’s performance after the drive has been left idle for half an hour:
Remember this is very low queue depth testing so the peak values aren't very high, but it's enough to show the idle garbage collection working.
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clovis501 - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
If this innovation will eventually make it's way down to personal computer, it could simplify board design by allowing us to do away with the ever-changing SATA standard. A PCI Bus for all drives, and so much bandwidth than any bus-level bottleneck would be a thing of the past. One Bus to rule them all!LancerVI - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
One bus to rule them all! That's a great point. One can hope. That would be great!AstroGuardian - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
I want AT to how me how long will it take to install Windows 7 from a fast USB stick, install all the biggest and IO hungry apps. Then i want to see how long will it take to start them all @ the same time having been put in the Start-up folder. Then i want to see how well would work 5 virtual machines doing some synthetic benchmarks (each one @ the same time) under windows 7.Than i will have a clear view of how fast these SSD monsters are.
Minion4Hire - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
Well aren't you demanding... =pPerisphetic - Thursday, September 30, 2010 - link
...or the past.Well it's probably deja vu, sounds like it.
This is exactly what the MCA (Micro Channel architecture) bus did.back in the day. My IBM PS/2 35 SX's hard drive connected directly to this bus which was also the way the plug in cards connected...
jonup - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
"Even our upcoming server upgrade uses no less than fifty two SSDs across our entire network, and we’re small beans in the grand scheme of things."That's why the prices of SSD stay so high. The demand on the server market is way to high. Manufacturers do not need to fight for the mainstream consumer.
mckirkus - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
I hate to feed trolls but this one is so easy to refute...The uptake of SSDs in the enterprise ultimately makes them cheaper/faster for consumers. If demand increases so does production. Also enterprise users buy different drives, the tech from those fancy beasts typically ends up in consumer products.
The analogy is that big car manufacturers have race teams for bleeding edge tech. If Anand bought a bunch of track ready Ferraris it wouldn't make your Toyota Yaris more expensive.
Flash production will ramp up to meet demand. Econ 101.
jonup - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
Except that there is a limited supply of NAND Flash supply is limited while the demand for Ferraris does affect the demand for Yarises. Further, advances in technologies does not have anything to do with the shortage for Flash. Still further, supply for flash is very inelastic due to the high cost of entry and possibly limited supply of raw materials (read silicon).p.s. Do yourself a favor, do not teach me economics.
jonup - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
Sorry for the bump, but in my original massage I simply expressed my supprise. I was not aware of the fact that SSD are so widely available/used in the commercial side.Ushio01 - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
I believe the random write and read graphs have been mixed up.