Dell and SSD drives

Wed Jan 28 19:57:36 CST 2009

I saw techreport's recent review of 4 of the X25-E's in RAID0, and while a 
cool test to do, it looks like they were pretty narrow in the target 
audience and missed a few things.  From running the test on P4 running XP 
only and not any mention of aligning the partitions to 64k boundaries for 
RAID offsets, they glazed over any serious database or high random IOP 
metrics.  I do realize they are trying to make their results comparable to 
the reviews they've done in the past, but at some point they need to 
upgrade.  Running on Vista or Server 2008 would fix the partition 
alignment issue.

The 2.5" drive connectors are the same as the 3.5", but the bracket for 
mounting it in a 3.5" bay would need to place them in the right spot.  If 
you followed the fallout that WD experienced in launching the 
Velociraptor, a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" bracket, this is the same issue they 
had to fix with the HLFS model.  That actually reminds me I did see a 
similar adapter that they used out on the market recently, which should 
work in a 3.5" hotswap bay.  It's the Icy Dock model MB882SP-1S-1B, 
available on Newegg, just search for item number N82E16817994064.  Should 
even keep roughly the same airflow past it as well, so it won't mess up 
the Dell design for airflow through the bays.

From:
<Kurt_Olsson at dell.com>
To:
<smooge at gmail.com>, <linux-poweredge at lists.us.dell.com>
Date:
01/28/2009 05:29 PM
Subject:
RE: Dell and SSD drives

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> 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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