Fusion-io vs SATA SSD RAID0?

[Vogelbung]

How many Vertexes I end up depends on how much of my kit is actually going - I'm in the process of unloading some of my kit to another business and some laptops with the OCZ's currently in them will likely be part of the deal - but I'm taking them out and returning them to factory-delivered HDD's. It'll be a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 11 that I'll end up with.

So that will dictate what I do with what. Either way though - I very much doubt I'd be looking at more than a two-drive SSD RAID per machine.

[K-TRON]

A Fusion I/O drive will obliterate any array of mechanical drives.
I remember watching a video on it maybe a year ago, and it did something like 800mb/sec at 0.1ms seek.

I would think it would take 50 15K drives in Raid 0 to get that kind of performance.Not that any single person needs that much speed, but thats just my interpretation.

If you want pure power, go for a good speedy harddrive, like the velociraptor, (something which doesnt need a SAS controller), or use an SSD for application loading.

I get plenty of performance out of my 15K raid array, but its more than anyone needs. It ends up bottlenecking in the memory as of now.

K-TRON

[K-TRON]

Originally Posted by Sprint

I dont really know about the actual RAID cards (which are good and bad).

I only know about the performance diffrences.

I can give you some numbers
My TYAN Motherboard has an onboard LSI 1068 SAS Raid controller. It can only do Raid 0 and Raid 1. It shares 64mb memory for RAID cababilities. The onboard controller is 66Mhz
My external - as in uses PCIExpress X8 - I have an LSI MegaRaid SAS 8480.
I have 512mb cache buffer on it, and a dedicated RAID engine. It is an 800Mhz XOR/Intel ARM processor if I recall correctly.

Performance wise, the onboard SAS is terrible. The cache is almost negligable it has, and seeks are about 1.7MS higher.
With the dedicated SAS controller from LSI, I am getting 400mb/sec at 10ms
On the onboard, I am barely getting 280mb/sec, at ~12.2ms

Numbers are numbers, but in real life performance there is a difference.
For one the dedicated SAS controller has a longer BIOS for it to pick up cards. It adds to pre-boot time.
Once Windows starts loading, its lightning faster.
The card has 512mb of cache, so opening small files over and over is much faster.

Please note that just about every dedicated Raid controller needs to be actively cooled. If you dont cool it, it will melt. I would not have thought that the 14 watt power budget of my SAS controller would equate to so much heat. It runs hotter than my 8800GTX. I just pulled the SAS array for now to build a custom heatsink for it. Its sitting in my homemade laptop, so I need it to be passively cooled.

The card I have is pretty good, but there are better cards out there, ones from Areca with 4-8Gb cache and up to two 1200MHz XOR processors. They are insanely overkill, to the extent that my $400 Raid Card is enough for me that I do not need a $3500 raid card to do the job

K-TRON

[Vogelbung]

Thanks for the baseline number. I'll now definitely run my own tests before deciding how the drives will be configured.