Author Topic: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID (Read 22679 times)

nosh · « **on:** March 10, 2009, 02:09 PM »

A viral video picked up by Ghacks.

Somehow, not as impressive as I expected it to be.

Edit: Image links to the video.

Edvard · « **Reply #1 on:** March 10, 2009, 02:42 PM »

I thought having 53 programs opened and fully loaded in a matter of seconds was fairly impressive...

Darwin · « **Reply #2 on:** March 10, 2009, 02:47 PM »

Dang, I was pretty impressed! However, given that the computer was running 2GB dedicated video memory and 8 cores, it wasn't that surprising. Made me wonder how this latest generation of SSD's compares to a traditional 7200rpm notebook drive, though... More compelling than the speed, though, for me is the (presumed) be reduced energy consumption, heat generation, and extended battery life.

I thought having 53 programs opened and fully loaded in a matter of seconds was fairly impressive...
-Edvard (March 10, 2009, 02:42 PM)

As did I!

nosh · « **Reply #3 on:** March 10, 2009, 03:06 PM »

I can start the four Office (2003) apps together in under a second on my system. I was hoping to see Windows starting up (post BIOS) in a couple of seconds or so.

PS: It took 18 seconds to open 53 programs, the SSDs could handle a load of 36GB, give or take a couple, in that time - surely the programs didn't size up to all that.

The SSDs were impressive but the system obviously had bottlenecks.

Darwin · « **Reply #4 on:** March 10, 2009, 03:22 PM »

I can start the four Office (2003) apps together in under a second on my system.
-nosh (March 10, 2009, 03:06 PM)

Out of curiosity - how do you go about starting them all at once and what are the specs on your system? Enquiring minds wan to know!

nosh · « **Reply #5 on:** March 10, 2009, 03:44 PM »

I just put these lines in a batch file that I ran from the same folder in the start menu as the shortcuts

access.lnk
powerpoint.lnk
word.lnk
excel.lnk

System Specs:
Core2Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz (no overclocking)
Mobo Gigabyte EX38-DS4
Corsair DDR2 4 GB
ATI Radeon HD 4800 512MB
WD Velociraptor 10000 RPM

Darwin · « **Reply #6 on:** March 10, 2009, 03:49 PM »

Cool - thanks, nosh! I'll have to give that a go on my system:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5Ghz 6MB L2 Cache 800Mhz
RAM: 4GB Kingston DDR2
Graphics: ATi Radeon HD2600 512MB GDDR3 800Mhz
Harddrive: Seagate ST9320421ASG Momentus G-Force 320GB 7200rpm

Darwin · « **Reply #7 on:** March 10, 2009, 03:57 PM »

OK - stopped mouth-breathing and thought about this - I went to Dopus and navigated to my start menu and simply highlighted the four shortcuts to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access and hit ENTER. All four loaded in under three seconds (but more than one - I used my mechanical wristwatch so the timing is not very accurate, but close enough). If I hadn't been timing it, it would have seemed instantaneous

BTW Nosh - very sweet system

PS added in EDIT: Just to note, in my case this isn't a very fair assessment as my computer has been up and running for about 13 hours and I've used both Word and Excel in that time. FWIW, opening ALL the links in my Office 2007 Enterprise folder took 8 seconds, including clicking on five dialogues - one for OneNote (no, I did not want to create a Notebook) one for Groove (no, not interested in creating a profile), two related to WinPatrol 2007, one for UAC and the other from WP itself wanting to know if I approved of adding OneNote to my system startup folder (nope), and finally an inexplicable error message from Endnote (which is NOT set up to open automatically with Word)

I also wound up with a second instance of Outlook open...

nosh · « **Reply #8 on:** March 10, 2009, 04:23 PM »

I went to Dopus and navigated to my start menu and simply highlighted the four shortcuts to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access and hit ENTER.

That didn't work for me using X² - it would just start Access and stop at that so I had to write the stupid batch file.

Deozaan · « **Reply #9 on:** March 10, 2009, 05:00 PM »

I'm not impressed.

Of course if you build a super computer it's going to be fast. I'd like to know how SSD drives work in your average consumer PC to see if it's worth all the hype to get one.

Mark0 · « **Reply #10 on:** March 10, 2009, 05:48 PM »

Most of the perceivable speed increase from SSD don't come from the transfer rate (witch is multiplied with a RAID 0 setup), but simply by the near access time that's about 3 order of magnitude less than a fast HD.
Sometimes even my terribly underpowered Eee PC surprise me for some workload, thanks to the (slow!) flash drive.

There was an interesting Slashdot news some days ago, given DonationCoder's target:
Slashdot - Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development?
As usual with /., the good part is especially in some of the comments:

[...]
I use SSDs for my (both) development systems--the first was for the work system, and after seeing the improvements I decided I would never use spinning-platter technology again.

The biggest performance gains are in my IDE (IntelliJ). My "normal" sized projects tend to link to hundreds of megs of JAR files, and the IDE is constantly performing inspections to validate the code is correct. No matter how fast the processor, you quickly become IO-bound as the computer struggles to parse through tens of thousands of classes. After upgrading to SSD, I no longer find the IDE struggling to keep up.
[...]

Bye!

f0dder · « **Reply #11 on:** March 10, 2009, 06:01 PM »

Decent SSD for OS + apps + sourcecode, RAMdisk for temporary files (and stuff like firefox profile, backed up of course), and a couple of raptors (or velociraptors

) for disk-intensive stuff (you don't want to wear out your SSD erase cycles too fast) - coupled with a large amount of storage on a gigabit fileserver... that'd be awesome. I'm currently missing the SSD part, waiting for SSDs to become good enough, and cheap as well.

Btw, RAIDing 24 SSDs... what's the cost of that compared to a single ioDrive? That product is likely to give better transfer rate (since it's not dealing with IDE or SATA controllers) as well as perhaps latency.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #12 on:** March 10, 2009, 08:31 PM »

I can start the four Office (2003) apps together in under a second on my system. I was hoping to see Windows starting up (post BIOS) in a couple of seconds or so.
-nosh (March 10, 2009, 03:06 PM)

Any truth to the rumour that Samsung boffins are working on an alternative rig that refuses to open MS-Office at all?

Mark0 · « **Reply #13 on:** March 10, 2009, 08:46 PM »

Another pseudo-random consideration: I think that startup time benchmark for this kind of comparisions is quite a bit unuseful. Eventually it can be of some interest for laptop users on the go (i.e., the ones that actually need to start / stop working), but surely isn't a very good indicator of the HDD vs SSD, because of all the pauses / fixed times needed for things like hardware initializations.

Also, simple load of one app often equal to just a transfer rate test, more or less.
Sometimes it can be more complex, for example with apps that then load lots of plugins (Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, etc.), or do a lot of I/O processing before showing something (Outlook, since it need to scan the mail & activity database, etc.); here the delta in favor of the SSD can be very noticeable.

As a (obvious) rule of thumb, whenever there's a lot of HD's heads trashing, an SSD can do wonders!

Darwin · « **Reply #14 on:** March 10, 2009, 09:23 PM »

Of course if you build a super computer it's going to be fast. I'd like to know how SSD drives work in your average consumer PC to see if it's worth all the hype to get one.
-Deozaan (March 10, 2009, 05:00 PM)

Yeah, pretty much what I was trying to say. Fail.

Deozaan · « **Reply #15 on:** March 10, 2009, 09:39 PM »

Of course if you build a super computer it's going to be fast. I'd like to know how SSD drives work in your average consumer PC to see if it's worth all the hype to get one.
-Deozaan (March 10, 2009, 05:00 PM)

Yeah, pretty much what I was trying to say. Fail.
-Darwin (March 10, 2009, 09:23 PM)

Additionally, who cares if it can access it super fast if it can only access it 500 times before the drive is dead. How does an SSD compare with an HDD when it comes to durability and the number of times data can be written to the disk?

There are so many more factors than just access time that should go into deciding what technology to use to store important data. Makes me think these marketing guys are the same marketing guys from Apple.

Mark0 · « **Reply #16 on:** March 10, 2009, 09:40 PM »

TechReport had a nice article some times ago, about the new Intel's SSD. There are both wordloads in witch there wasn't much of a difference, and others in witch it was dramatic (concurrent access to the drive):

TechReport - A look at four X25-E Extreme SSDs in RAID - iPEAK multitasking

Mark0 · « **Reply #17 on:** March 10, 2009, 09:42 PM »

Additionally, who cares if it can access it super fast if it can only access it 500 times before the drive is dead. How does an SSD compare with an HDD when it comes to durability and the number of times data can be written to the disk?
-Deozaan (March 10, 2009, 09:39 PM)

That's simply a non-issue with moderns SSD (acutally, it wasn't anymore by sometimes).

Deozaan · « **Reply #18 on:** March 10, 2009, 09:58 PM »

Additionally, who cares if it can access it super fast if it can only access it 500 times before the drive is dead. How does an SSD compare with an HDD when it comes to durability and the number of times data can be written to the disk?
-Deozaan (March 10, 2009, 09:39 PM)

That's simply a non-issue with moderns SSD (acutally, it wasn't anymore by sometimes).
-Mark0 (March 10, 2009, 09:42 PM)

That's good to know. But there's still plenty more I'd like to know about SSDs before I'd be willing to pay more for less storage space.

Shades · « **Reply #19 on:** March 10, 2009, 10:34 PM »

Don't know where I read it, the name of the site slipped from my mind and searching the history didn't turn up anything.

What I do remember from the article was that a RAID setup where a standard SSD drive was used to "police" the file traffic to normal hard disks in the same RAID was seriously faster than a similar RAID setup consisting of Raptor Hard disks. 30% extra throughput was easy to do and in this setup the SSD would take long time before wearing down.

nudone · « **Reply #20 on:** March 11, 2009, 04:38 AM »

my own quantum computer did all that in the video 50 times over in less time - so fast, in fact, it finished before i had even started the whole process with the batch command.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #21 on:** March 11, 2009, 05:37 AM »

my own quantum computer did all that in the video 50 times over in less time - so fast, in fact, it finished before i had even started the whole process with the batch command.
-nudone (March 11, 2009, 04:38 AM)

Well, my quantum computer functions only in quantum leap years, so it finishes 4 years earlier on every pass.
You can probably tell from the quality of my responses that, so far, it has taken me back to being 5 years old!
After the next couple of runs I won't yet have been born so you'll no longer suffer from my off-topic nonsense.

nosh · « **Reply #22 on:** March 11, 2009, 05:55 AM »

I'm a fan, FWIW.

And LMAO at your clown badge, which I only just noticed!

nudone · « **Reply #23 on:** March 11, 2009, 07:24 AM »

my quantum computer functions only in quantum leap years, so it finishes 4 years earlier on every pass.
-cranioscopical (March 11, 2009, 05:37 AM)

now that is impressive.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #24 on:** March 11, 2009, 08:11 AM »

I just put these lines in a batch file that I ran from the same folder in the start menu as the shortcuts
access.lnk
powerpoint.lnk
word.lnk
excel.lnk
-nosh (March 10, 2009, 03:44 PM)

How do you get it to do all four at once? I have tried BAT and CMD files but it loads the first app and only opens the second app when you close the first app window etc. ?