KingSpec's 2TB Multicore PCI-E SSD whopper vs the rest Earlier this year we took a look at SSD caching, an alternative way of getting some SSD performance added to a system without too much strain put on the finances. So how about a gander at the other end of the spectrum – huge capacity and performance and a total disregard for the budget Enter the KingSpec Multicore MC1S81M2T, a …
The LSI MegaRaid 9271-4i with four Crucial M4 512GB drives comes in at 1576.23 including delivery, with performance not far outside the KingSpec, having quoted the KingSpec secondary setup as the second best performer based on the ATTO benchmark.
Do the lower capacity KingSpec cards stay in the 8-up formation, or drop to 6-up and 4-up. At which point, for the 1TB is the performance comparative the the above specification?
Easy: (240GB x 8) = 2061584302080 bytes = 2TB (base 10) = 1.875TB (base 2)
Storage manufacturers use a different measuring stick, as they have always done. This is becoming somewhat more of an issue now that storage is getting so large and the discrepancy is getting so big. Its one of the reasons people have tried to implement the ibi standard (MiB, GiB, etc) for the base 2 values.
In the real world, if you're moving small files around, any modern disk will move them "instantly", so the small file performance is of little concern, unless you're moving a huge number of them.
Where this drive excels is when moving/saving the sort of files that normally send you off for a coffee and few games of freecell (like opera recordings, or HD video).
Want one!
PS I didn't see any DATA on boot times. How bad is it?
> In the real world, if you're moving small files around, any modern disk will move them "instantly", so the small file performance is of little concern, unless you're moving a huge number of them.
That's not the disk though, that's the cacheing on your OS accelerating your reads by holding recently read data in memory and instantly acknowleging writes before they've actually been commited to disk.
Do the same operation again with synchronous write semantics and a cold read cache and you'll see a massive advantage to the SSD.
> Where this drive excels is when moving/saving the sort of files that normally send you off for a coffee and few games of freecell (like opera recordings, or HD video).
What sort of shit heap have you got on your desk that means you have to get coffee while it copies files?
Real world example: download a multi-gigabyte recording of one of the recent Wagner operas featured at the Proms. It's in AAC format. Open file in audio editor to edit into separate Acts. Save resulting wav file on HDD before editing. Plenty of time for coffee and freecell.
>What sort of shit heap have you got on your desk that means you have to get coffee while it copies files?
Probably a recent model Apple desktop.... got a 2013 i5 iMac right here and it is a pisspoor performer in every respect, the very epitome of style over performance :)
There are three issues I see with this:
1) In any even remotely realistic use-case, you will run out of another resource (CPU or network) long before you reach the level of sequential I/O performance this device can allegedly deliver.
2) The test graphs only cover sequential I/O, not random I/O. What is the 4KB random-write performance on this device after it has been "primed" with a full fill from /dev/urandom?
3) Being based on mSATA SSDs, this is little more than an 8-port SATA card.
So what is the big deal? You can easily achieve similar performance using a decent 8-port SAS card and 8 similar SATA SSDs (e.g. from Intel or Kingston).
This data is pretty useless then in terms of comparing to what else is out there on the market. Why not compare it to the read/write speeds of a floppy disk drive whilst you are at it?
Sorry to be a bit down about this post but i was expecting more, a quick google search of PCI-E SSD on shopping will show a load of other PCI-E Drives available yes, you maybe looking at 2TB's of storage but why compare speeds if its all about size...
Ok... yes its expensive and I'm sure that within a couple of years it will be smaller and more efficient.
But if I had unlimited funds... I'd build out a small hadoop cluster using low powered Intel chips, 1 or 2 of these cards in Streacom FC10 chassis with a small SSD for OS and stuff.
While it will be very expensive and wouldn't be as fast or as powerful as other options... it would be one beautiful looking box (remember those Crays?) and could sit in your office conference room for demos.
Yes, its not for everyone... but it would be very cool.
> Large files served up fast?
>
> Lots of scope for the "adult entertainment" market perhaps?
The problem with that is you have to be copying to another copy of the relevant hardware or you are going to bottleneck immediately on whatever that other thing is (network,storage).
It's like getting excited that your new spinny disk can do reads at 160MB/s when everything reading from it will be bottlenecked by GigE and limited to a mere 100MB/s at best.
"It's like getting excited that your new spinny disk can do reads at 160MB/s when everything reading from it will be bottlenecked by GigE and limited to a mere 100MB/s at best."
Of course that 160Mb/s falls off rapidly when the reads are random, which is where SSDs exel.
The first use I can think of for a 2Tb card is as cache for a large ZFS array, coupled with a decent PCIe write cache of 8Gb or so (they're a LOT cheaper than the 1600 quid you'll fork out for a STEC ZeusRAM drive and hellaciously faster on latencies because they're not constrained by 6Gb SAS/DATA interfaces.)
The real question for such a card is "How does it stack up against FusionIO's offering?", not "how does it stack up against a bunch of drives on a bandwidth-limited bus?"
As someone else stated: "sandforce" is a warning label for performance equipment.
There is something fiddley to be aware of.
If cardlanes == slotlanes, they fit together easily.
If cardlanes < slotlanes, the card fits in and works, though the slot will have a few lanes wasted.
if cardlanes > slotlands, then *electronically* they work - though the card won't run at full speed. Mechanically, it won't actually fit into the slot. Not until you do some delicate work with a dremel. Once the appropriate (literal) hacking has been done, then you can use it.
Years ago I found out that they did a decent capacity, OK-ish price 1.8" PATA SSD that would fit in a Rio Karma, so I got one via eBay. It never worked properly. Sent it back for repair, at my cost; almost 1/3 the amount of the overall drive. Came back four weeks later, still didn't work properly in any PATA device. Basically just flash errors everywhere. Just had to write it off. I won't touch KingSpec kit again after that. A dud device is one thing, but acknowledging a fault, "repairing" it at the owner's cost and sending back a still broken device? No thanks.
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