Micron P320h PCIe SSD (700GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 15, 2012 3:00 AM ESTEnterprise Storage Bench - Oracle Swingbench
We begin with a popular benchmark from our server reviews: the Oracle Swingbench. This is a pretty typical OLTP workload that focuses on servers with a light to medium workload of 100 - 150 concurrent users. The database size is fairly small at 10GB, however the workload is absolutely brutal.
Swingbench consists of over 1.28 million read IOs and 3.55 million writes. The read/write GB ratio is nearly 1:1 (bigger reads than writes). Parallelism in this workload comes through aggregating IOs as 88% of the operations in this benchmark are 8KB or smaller. This test is actually something we use in our CPU reviews so its queue depth averages only 1.33. We will be following up with a version that features a much higher queue depth in the future.
Intel's SSD 910 didn't do well at all in our Oracle Swingbench test, mostly due to its inability to perform well at very small transfer sizes (512B). The P320h is no different here and is easily outperformed by standard 2.5" SATA SSDs (although Micron's P400e also does really poorly here). The results here just go to show how important it is that you understand your workload when picking an enterprise SSD.
Average service time is nice and low for the P320h, it's just we don't end up seeing a high throughput rate for the SSD.
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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.