Intel SSD 910 Review: PCI Express-Based Enterprise Storage

[Guest]

What about TRIM? The drive does its own RAID. If you did RAID with a regular drive, you could not use TRIM and the drive dies quickly. Is TRIM now on the card or will the Windows OS handle it? Will VMware work on it?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]B97209[/nom]What about TRIM? The drive does its own RAID. If you did RAID with a regular drive, you could not use TRIM and the drive dies quickly. Is TRIM now on the card or will the Windows OS handle it? Will VMware work on it?[/citation]

It's own RAID 0. It might have TRIM. What type of RAID determines whether or not it can have TRIM with certain drivers. VMWare should work just fine on it.

 

[raidtarded]

Attempting to extrapolate NAND endurance from the first one percent of lifetime usage is foolhardy and misleading. A closer approximation would be after extended writing to at least 50% of the media wear indicator. This would allow other factors such as bad sectors, reallocation, cell dwell time and static data rotation to reflect the true endurance. There are too many factors that are not taken into consideration with this type of 'measurement'.
Also, drive 'conditioning' with sequential data is fundamentally flawed. Writing sequential data to any NAND device is, in effect, cleaning the NAND. There should never be any type of sequential writing prior to a random data load.
This explains many of the unrealistically high results obtained in this review.

 

[jemm]

SSDs should replace HDDs in about 5 years.

 

[Eric Kolotyluk]

[citation][nom]s3anister[/nom]PCI-E Solid State Storage is great but I can't help but wonder; where is the Memristor? The true performance gains to be had are with massive RAM-disks that aren't volatile.[/citation]
Before I got my Intel 910 800 GB I was playing with a RAM Disk on my computer - I have 192 GB of 800 MHz RAM. Using VMWare Workstation 8 I created a virtual disk in the RAM Disk. I installed Windows 8 build 8400 in it, and I am able to boot Windows in 9 seconds.

After installing my Intel 910 and creating a software RAID 0 on it, I created a VMWare virtual disk on the RAID 0 and Installed Windows 8 again. I can get this Windows to boot in 11 seconds.

In another experiment I set up Moonwalk HSM software to migrate my virtual disk from the 910 to a RAID 5 file system. After the migration all the files had been removed from the 910 with only empty stubs left behind. When I started up VMWare again and booted Windows 8 it took about 14 seconds the first time (including the demigration), and then went back to 11 seconds subsequent times.

Overall, using devices like the 910 in an HSM environment is a very convenient way to treat smaller high performance storage as if it were a much larger device. Sadly, HSM software like Moonwalk is incredibly costly for a single workstation. Ideally it would be nice to see HSM features built into Linux, OS X, Windows etc to implement tiered storage in workstations and desktops more transparently.

Sadly, the performance of a software RAID 0 on the 910 does not seem to be any better than direct access to the 910 as JBOD. I cannot seem to find an explanation for that from anywhere. I wish TH would look into that more closely.

- Eric