News - LSI announces astoundingly fast PCIe SSD

[HEXUS]

WarpDrive accelerator card delivers obscene performance for similarly astronomical price.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

So how much will this speed-demon set you back? The starting price for the 300GB WarpDrive is ... around £9,000 inc VAT.

Damn, I was just thinking one of these would go nicely with my Q6600 and SLI 8800GTXs...

Great for HPC and dataserver use, I guess - that's a lot of IO in a very small space. I assume this is essentially a pre-raided array of smaller disks?

[bear jesus]

Damn, I was just thinking one of these would go nicely with my Q6600 and SLI 8800GTXs...

Great for HPC and dataserver use, I guess - that's a lot of IO in a very small space. I assume this is essentially a pre-raided array of smaller disks?

From what i have read on other sites it is basically 6 ssd pcb's in a raid array, to be honest though given the choice of a 6 drive raid array or this i know i would choose this just to be lazy.

you can see the "drives" are stacked to give the 6.

[Terbinator]

Wouldn't six SF1200 drives be faster, cheaper and leave some change in your pocket anyway.

[mikemikemi]

Wouldn't six SF1200 drives be faster, cheaper and leave some change in your pocket anyway.

A 100 F60s would leave change in your pocket.

How does this compare to a ramsan?

[spoon_]

How does this compare to a ramsan?

ransam gets eaten alive by LSI WarpDrive, almost twice the bandwidth & IOPS.

Not the mention the physical size...

[kalniel]

Wouldn't six SF1200 drives be faster, cheaper and leave some change in your pocket anyway.

Doubt it - this is SLC, not slow MLC.

[aidanjt]

Doubt it - this is SLC, not slow MLC.

Actually he's right, the SF1200 tends to keep the SATA link saturated, 6 of them each on their own SATA link will easily surpass 1,400MB/s. In fact the peak figure should be in the region of 1,680MB/s, with average speed not much lower than that.

[Georgy291]

absolutely useless, i cant thin of a single use for this thing at this price at all. Yes its fast blah blah blah. BUT when you consider the 2 areas of use

home - very nice and fast but far far too expensive for pretty much everyone in their homes

business / servers - absoltely useless, yes its very fast. but the capacity isnt very big ie only 300gig. and also as all SSDs this will suffer from the same fundamental flaw as all other flash memory. It has very limited number or read write operations and as such its not practical for a server. As the users are going to log in to the server and repeatedly re read the same parts of the storage array, that will kill that section very quickly.

so a 30+ array of SCSI drives will be just as fast but it wont suffer from the read write cycles limit and there for be a better choice. not to mention might actually be cheaper to

[Terbinator]

Read doesn't have any negative effects AFAIK.

[Georgy291]

Reading does have negative affects due to transistor structure of the array

[miniyazz]

Got a link?

[crossy]

business / servers - absoltely useless, yes its very fast. but the capacity isnt very big ie only 300gig. and also as all SSDs this will suffer from the same fundamental flaw as all other flash memory. It has very limited number or read write operations and as such its not practical for a server. As the users are going to log in to the server and repeatedly re read the same parts of the storage array, that will kill that section very quickly.

so a 30+ array of SCSI drives will be just as fast but it wont suffer from the read write cycles limit and there for be a better choice. not to mention might actually be cheaper to

Sorry Georgy, even with my limited SSD knowledge I know that some of what you're saying here isn't right. First off, flash "wear" only applies to write operations - program or erase (to quote Intel) - not to read. So your users can sit there and download that data (into RAM?) as much as they like and they'll wear out before the SSD does.

Secondly, 300GB is plenty big enough for an OS and app combo for business* - just as long as you don't put your data there (not that I would, since it's going to knacker the SSD too quickly). I'm pretty sure that if you paired this SSD with some RAID'd real disk that the resulting system would make a darned good Oracle DB server - for example. Put the OS and Oracle programs on the SSD, and leave the data on the RAID array. For a Linux install of Oracle (again using them as an example) you could easily fit a minimal OS and the programs on a tiny fraction of 300GB, and even if you're using Windows then I seem to remember that a <300GB install of OS+progs is possible.

(* assuming that this PCIe SSD is bootable of course)

Or how about web server - Linux or Windows server with Apache, that'll fit easily. Just checked TechNet and it looks like even a smallish Sharepoint install with Server 2008 wouldn't be out of the question hosted totally on the SSD (although that might be a bad idea unless the SP site was merely a reference - don't want all those doc writes to wear out the SSD!). In either case, I like the idea that the high speed of the SSD would do wonders for OS and app load times (excluding - of course - the time taken to load the app data from "slow" disk).

Remember that just because the geniuses* here @Hexus have multiTB raid arrays for MP3, Videos, etc - don't assume that all folks need that as a base requirement. That said, if I was doing this kind of thing for business, then I'd still be looking at SAN because I'd probably have few boxes that could do with the speed boost, and it'd make more sense to spend that budget on a small SAN (which could also then speed up the data areas).

(* I don't include myself anywhere near that description. I'll continue to live in awe of the the folks who do)

Agree though, that it's not that relevant for home use - unless perhaps you're talking about home-office type use - although there's plenty of folks in the extreme overclocking area who seem to have shedloads of disposable cash - e.g. those who push i7-980x (a chip that costs more than my entire home PC budget!) to the limits and, in some cases, beyond those limits!