Micron P320h PCIe SSD (700GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 15, 2012 3:00 AM ESTEnterprise 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% | |||
Things look a lot better with our first SQL benchmark, Micron's P320h outperforms both of the OCZ SandForce based offerings. Only Intel's 910 is faster, but it maintains a healthy performance advantage here over the P320h (~44%).
Average service times are very low, which is one of the benefits of being able to serve so many IOs in parallel by a native PCIe SSD controller.
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Jaybus - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
Any particular drive is going to be one or the other. Why make a single complex cotroller when you can make two targeted controllers?crackedwiseman - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
Any chance we could see some power consumption numbers on the various PCI-E SSDs? It would be interesting to see if the higher levels of integration in the NVMe controller solution are reflected by power savings. Also, its a shame it's not PCI-E 3.0 certified (although I'm sure it will be, given time) - it's not that the extra bandwidth is necessary, but you could achieve the same bandwidth with fewer lanes.cosmotic - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Where's the test results from something like an Areca 1882 filled with high-performance SSDs?N00dles71 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Its funny to see all the dreamers here wishing it booted so when they won the lotto they could have one to go with their quad chip triple SLI dream machine.Seriously though, the SLC makes it a good sell to the boss who is worried about it dying before its time. Versus SAS hard drives/SSDs you just pull the dead one out and swap in a new one. Not so easy with these cards if you don't have them mirrored. Add the current market cost of a 2nd one to the mirror it does make it a hard sell. You could rely on these running a bit too well so that failure becomes a massive concern. So far we only trust the HP ones to store data that can easily be restored or is our prime business of massive scale market data capture and therefore mostly useless after 30 minutes.
We have just started using the HP badged (Fusion) IO Accelerator and are well impressed with its performance. We would love to start using it in more servers but even with preferential HP pricing these are not cheap. If this thing was certified to run in Proliant DL 38x & 58x servers at $3000 I think the market just got tipped on its head. I can't see the competition getting much cheaper than around $8000 on the HP cards so Micron are either going to go in hard and disruptive or they might settle for a "cheaper" price closer to the competition to keep margins high. It would be a shame if they did, these devices are just about ready for a big push into the enterprise market that it is ripe for someone to come in and sweep it all up. We would have brought 4 times the number of cards versus the HP ones.
klmccaughey - Friday, November 2, 2012 - link
This is the second Micron review you have done that there is no available product for. The last one was their new SSD drive which still hasn't appeared. I am in the UK. I wrote to them about the last review you did and they said that although Micron was their parent company, they has no information on when a product would or would not be available.I don't understand why they send you products for review, yet even months (nearly a year for the first one?) they aren't shipping the product.
I can understand proof of concept and all that, and I love this PCIE card, but it's all fantasy IT until we can actually get our hands on it :)
klmccaughey - Friday, November 2, 2012 - link
I meant Crucial by the way - Crucial are still only on the M4 and no sign of any of the stuff they send you ending up on the shelf ;)snozzy - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
Go to cdw.com and search for "micron p320". You can purchase the exact same card used in this review.You can also buy these parts though Dell in a 2.5" form factor along with a server. Go configure a R620/R720/R820 with the PCIe SSD option.