Dell and SSD drives

[Kurt_Olsson at Dell.com]

My friends over at techreport.com just did a lot of work with the Intel
SSDs and ACard's ANS-9010, which may have been the device referenced in
one of the earlier posts.

 

Depending on the server and your desire to "modify," to get power for
devices that are not normally expected to be installed (ANS-9010), the
question may be moot.  Nevertheless, the data and testing done there
might help you to form opinions about whether this is a good option for
you.

 

Re connectors, I believe that there is no physical difference between
the power and data connector spacing for 2.5" or 3.5" drives.  This PDF
has a bit more regarding the physical interface.
http://www.scsita.org/aboutscsi/sas/tutorials/SAS_Physical_layer.pdf
You would still have some airflow and stabilization issues if you placed
2.5" drives into 3.5" bays.

 

**Above does not represent Dell endorsement.**

 

From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of
Brian_Pickering at selinc.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 6:47 PM
To: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Re: Dell and SSD drives

 


Even faster than the iRAM or the other DRAM based SATA ones, which are
usually limited to 200-250MB/sec, is the FusionIO ioDrive
<http://www.fusionio.com <http://www.fusionio.com/> > PCIe cards.  They
bypass SATA/SAS altogether and attach a Flash disk directly to a high
speed PCIe port.  They aren't cheap, about $3000 for an 80GB model last
I checked, and only support 64bit Linux kernels right now, but they are
pretty much the fastest thing next to a SAN with a ton of cache.  120k
IOPS and upwards of 700MB/sec on one of these. 

One step down in price would be a Intel X25-E 32GB SATA SSD at around
$500ea.  These can do about 200MB/sec and a few thousand IOPS,
equivalent to about a dozen 15krpm SAS drives.  If you have 2.5" trays
in that server, they would fit right in those, but if you had 3.5" ones
I don't think there are any adapters that would fit the hotswap bays
that I've seen. 

From: 

Adam Nielsen <adam.nielsen at uq.edu.au> 

To: 

Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> 

Cc: 

"linux-poweredge at lists.us.dell.com" <linux-poweredge at lists.us.dell.com> 

Date: 

01/28/2009 04:28 PM 

Subject: 

Re: Dell and SSD drives

 

________________________________




>> Perhaps another alternative is one of those i-RAM type cards, which
let you
>> attach battery-backed RAM to a SATA port.  I think they'd be in the
same
>> price range as an SSD, only they're a *lot* faster (apparently the
SATA port
>> is the bottleneck, so ~300MB/sec read/write.)  I think they'd
certainly be
>> the fastest option, however I'm not sure whether you can get them in
decent
>> sizes (maybe 8-16GB?)  The battery would also guarantee persistence
over
>> reboots and (short) shut downs.
> 
> Ahh thats exactly what I was looking for. Thankyou. Do you know what
> the class of 'disks' these are called?

No I don't - Gigabyte Technology made the first one (they called it the 
i-RAM) and I recall seeing another manufacturer's version a few weeks 
back.  Hopefully Google can help there.

The Gigabyte one is actually a PCI card which has a SATA connector on 
it, so you plug that from the PCI card onto the motherboard's SATA 
connector.  Not quite sure how that would work with hotswap SATA drives 
etc.  They have a CD-ROM size version too, but that probably won't fit 
in many servers.  Wikipedia has a bit on it.

Cheers,
Adam.

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