The Intel SSD 910 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 9, 2012 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 910
Enterprise Storage Bench - Microsoft SQL UpdateDailyStats
Our next two tests are taken from our own internal infrastructure. We do a lot of statistics tracking at AnandTech - we record traffic data to all articles as well as aggregate traffic for the entire site (including forums) on a daily basis. We also keep track of a running total of traffic for the month. Our first benchmark is a trace of the MS SQL process that does all of the daily and monthly stats processing for the site. We run this process once a day as it puts a fairly high load on our DB server. Then again, we don't have a beefy SSD array in there yet :)
The UpdateDailyStats procedure is mostly reads (3:1 ratio of GB reads to writes) with 431K read operations and 179K write ops. Average queue depth is 4.2 and only 34% of all IOs are issued at a queue depth of 1. The transfer size breakdown is as follows:
| AnandTech Enterprise Storage Bench MS SQL UpdateDaily Stats IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 8KB | 21% | |||
| 64KB | 35% | |||
| 128KB | 35% | |||
Our SQL benchmarks are far more compatible with the 910 in terms of IO size, as a result Intel posts the absolute best scores we've seen yet here. The 400GB drive cuts performance in half compared to the 800GB model, but you're still looking at 3x the performance from a 200GB Intel SSD 710. Toshiba's 400GB drive does very well, but Intel's SSD 520 ends up being the fastest 2.5" drive here.
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lorribot - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
I like the idea but coming from a highly redundant arrays point of view how do you set this all up in a a safe and secure way, what are the points of failure? what happens if you lose the bridge chip, is all your data dead and buried?Would you be looking to put say 3 of these cards in a server and software raid 5 across the cards for multiple disks?
No hardware raid solution will work across multiple PCI-e cards so there really needs to be some work in how to manage all this in a sensible way needs to be done.
I doubt any one in an Enterprise would stick one of these in a server and use it as primary storage for their SAP database it is way too risky a proposition.
What would be good is a 3 1/5 format drive with a fibre channel interface that could work in existing storage solutions.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
-- What would be good is a 3 1/5 format drive with a fibre channel interface that could work in existing storage solutions.If memory serves, that's what STEC made and hasn't been all that profitable.
Guspaz - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
At the end of the first page, "performnace"happycamperjack - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
Wouldn't it be more fair to compare it to a 800 gb CM88 R4 since it's around the same capacity and price as the intel 910 and quite a bit faster.Elixer - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
What happens when it is over 60% full on these things ? I am betting a huge drop off in speed, just like the desktop parts.MrSpadge - Sunday, August 12, 2012 - link
Probably not, since they're >50% overprovisioned.Jammrock - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
I would like to see some Fusion-IO tests. They are generally considered the highest end in enterprise SSDs. I've played with some in the past and they were crazy fast and reliable.puffpio - Friday, August 10, 2012 - link
agreed..any thoughts on a heads up between this and a similar capacity fusion io iodrive2?happycamperjack - Friday, August 10, 2012 - link
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-SSD-910-PCI-E...hmmmmmm - Saturday, August 11, 2012 - link
unfortunately, they are comparing the 910 to a 2009, discontinued card from fusion-io. would like to see a new card in the comparison to be able to compare what's on the market today