OCZ ZDrive is back

[M Yancey]

I wonder how long it will be before someone will try to install 2 of these in a PC? LOL LOL...
What do you think HDCHOPPER???

[HDCHOPPER]

Give me 2 and I will show you allllll the benches you want

[goldpelican]

Reason I'm interested in how the performance is with iSCSI is the potential to use it as the basis for a virtual iSCSI SAN in a VMware environment using something like OpenFiler or StorMagic. The form factor appears to be the same as a full height full length RAID card, so instead of using a RAID card with a number of attached drives, you could plug in a 512GB e84 and run a virtual SAN on it, within a 1U form factor. Two of them in two servers with replication (like StorMagic SvSAN) would give redundancy. If the IOPS holds up, you could run any number of VMs from them in a very compact space.

[HDCHOPPER]

That makes sence to me or use Vertex EX (SLC) or Agility EX series ( SLC) series drives with an LSI card ...

Being used in a iSCSI enviorment wouln't kill it we just are speed freaks

[mrhappi]

Finally got some numbers from my buddy! He generated this using iometer on a 500GB z-drive put into a dual socket server from supermicro, 8x PCIe slot...

[Pyrolistical]

Those 4k random read/writes are really sad. I expected a lot more.

Just look at this:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...8&postcount=19

+200 MB/s random read with 4x raid 0 on ICH10R, and this is using the slow 30 GB!

[azzie]

Thanks for the plots mrhappi. Few things surprised me:

1. Don't you think it would be worth trying higher I/Os? The performance does not yet seem to be saturated except sequential operations with a number of threads.
2. Do you know why random reads reach higher performance than sequential reads? Note that at the same time random writes reach lower performance that sequential writes (not unexpected).

[mrhappi]

@ pyrolistical - The lower throughput may have to do with the controller itself... the card is a remarked supermicro raid controller based on the LSI 1068 chip, with 4 drives in RAID 0 (they even include the supermicro driver CD) http://www.supermicro.com/products/a...USAS-L4i_R.cfm. There don't seem to be any options for read-ahead/write-back cache as you see on the new LSI 9260 cards (LSI 2108 chip); there's only 16 MB cache anyway... We did not try to rebuild the raid 0 array with a different stripe size (wanted to test as it came from the factory) but that may change the results a bit... will have to check next week...

Luckily, my buddy is most concerned with getting the maximum IOPS out of it, rather than raw throughput, as eventually it will be accessed via iSCSI. Plus he likes the self-contained nature of the beast, leaving the standard drive bays free on the server.

@ azzie
1. higher i/os - i will ask my buddy if he can run that and see
2. random read being higher - not sure how that worked out, but perhaps it may be pulling data from more individual flash chips at once during the random read than the sequential read; just guessing though

in a perfect world, i'd love to put the z-drive up against 4 Vertex in this server http://www.supermicro.com/products/s...-1016I-M6F.cfm It is a socket 1156 system with an onboard LSI 2008 based raid controller and 8x2.5" SATA/SAS bays. Little or no cache, but an improved controller. Plus, the onboard SATA controller is more like an ICH10R for servers (intel 3420 chipset) so it could be compared as well.

Just some more info on the construction - There is a custom sata backplane attached to the internal SAS connector all hidden under the black plastic cover at the rear of the card. The external SAS connector is also there, but i'm not sure if it's functional, though it looks like it could be used after poking around in the controller BIOS. Note the card does not look exactly like the supermicro link above as there is no shield or easy external access to the sas connector that faces to the rear of the chassis.

[Pyrolistical]

But you could get way more IOPS out of a LSI 9260. Space isn't an issue if you buy the right case. Like any of the SC216:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/?chs=216

24x 2.5" slots in a 2U!