This week’s storage news roundup includes news from Intel, SandForce/ OCZ, LSI and Amahi. The basic theme is, new generation SSDs and controllers are going to be faster in terms of sequential performance and random I/O performance. Oh, and ServeTheHome is on Twitter!
Intel Announces the New 510 SSD
Based on a Marvell controller, Intel announced their new 510 series SSD.
“The Intel SSD 510 Series uses proven Intel 34-nanometer NAND flash memory to deliver best-in-class sequential performance of up to 500MB/s sequential read speeds and up to 315 MB/s writes for its high-capacity model. The product is available now and comes in a 250GB capacity priced at $584 and a 120GB at $284, for 1,000-unit quantities. Both products include a limited 3-year warranty.”
That is a huge performance boost over the previous generation X25-M series. Interestingly Intel is using 34nm NAND which is more costly, but has better durability characteristics than the newer generation NAND.
Reviews have found that the Intel 510 drives, like other drives based on the same Marvell controller (e.g. the Corsair P3-128 reviewed this week), have great sequential performance on 6.0gbps controllers but less than stellar 4K random I/O performance.
Just as a note, Amazon.com does not have stock as of this writing, but is $20 less expensive for the 510 120gb than NewEgg.
SandForce Began Sampling its SF-2200 Series Controller
The consumer controller lacks the super capacitor found on enterprise drives, but appears to have significantly improved performance. OCZ appears to be ahead of the curve sampling drives to the media. The SF-2200 series controller, as announced, appears also to be capable of 500MB/s reads over a SATA III 6.0gbps interface and should have better error correction, performance, and wear leveling than previous generation controllers. Less exciting was a concurrent SF-2100 controller announcement which is a SATA II 3.0gbps interface controller, but less is known about this controller at this time.
Overall it looks like if SandForce’s firmware is up to par this go-round, their controller may be well in the lead in generation 3 solid state drives.
LSI Ships the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i and 9285-8e
LSI started shipping next-gen controllers the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i and 9285-8e (internal and external) and are based on the new SAS2208 RAID-On-Chip (ROC) devices, which have dual 800MHz PowerPC RoC processors and 1GB of onboard DDR3 memory.
LSI claims up to 465,000 IOPS from the new controllers using eight SSDs, and LSI’s FastPath software (available as an additional add-on) with RAID-5. Without FastPath LSI quotes a 200,000 IOPS figure. That is a fairly huge performance boost from the new-generation of controllers. Also claimed are sequential numbers of 2.7GB/s and 3.2GB/s read and write respectively in RAID 5 when data is hitting the cache and 2.6GB/s sustained.
Amahi 6 Released with Greyhole 0.9
Amahi 6 was released this week which had a couple of new features. Probably the biggest change of the Fedora 14 variant is the inclusion of Greyhole 0.9 which porports to have a myriad of stability and performance enhancements. One such enhancement is the move from SQLite to MySQL as a database back end. Another change is the inclusion of an app store and two premium account levels in addition to the free account. Finally, there is a feature called Amahi Sync which syncs files with a cloud-based storage solution.
ServeTheHome on Twitter
I finally got around to making a Twitter account for ServeTheHome which can be found at http://www.twitter.com/ServeTheHome/
