Comments on: VisionTek mSATA 480GB SSD Review – Trusted LSI SandForce Speeds with a High Capacity

By: boogerlad

boogerlad — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 20:12:00 +0000

In reply to Thomas Leavitt. That's just two Sandforce ssds on a raid card. Nothing special about it.

By: Les@TheSSDReview

Les@TheSSDReview — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:48:00 +0000

In reply to Thomas Leavitt. We have the DataFusion PCIe in hand and will be looking at it shortly. Tx for the input.

By: Thomas Leavitt

Thomas Leavitt — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:44:00 +0000

I just bought a 960GB PCIe SSD (which formats down to 894GB available) from VisionTek (it is actually two PCIe SSDs in one package that default to a RAID0 configuration)… net price to my client, including tax, was barely over $1000! I put it in a Dell workstation where the user is doing NGS analysis, which is very I/O performance dependent. No real world experience yet, and after the previous Samsung 840 SSD crashed and burned after less than six months, I’m restricting it to functioning as a secondary drive (Windows 7 system), and telling the user to make sure his data is backed up to the external SSD and server (esp. since it is RAID0, and coming from a relatively unknown vendor). This plugs into the 4x PCIe slot.

Still… the price… and they claim 100,000 IOPS (which I can believe, given that this is a PCIe SSD, not bottlenecked by the SAS/SATA controller)… my 2013 MBP with a 512GB 2x PCIe internal SSD (10GBps of actual bandwidth) nets out to 700MBps transfer rates per a benchmarking application.

If this works, I’m seriously thinking about having one of my clients build a screaming VMware cluster using VSA or the equivalent. Think about it: ~2.7TB of 100,000 IOPS class storage performance for under 10k (3 cards each in three servers)… EMC will charge you $10,000 for a single shelf with six SAS disks in it, with total IOPS under 1000.

I’m also pondering the idea of rolling my own flash based storage server, by sticking 8 of these in a server, and putting OpenFiler or somesuch on it.

By: How_delightful

How_delightful — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:14:00 +0000

In reply to Les@TheSSDReview.

Ok; I am halfway there.

Thank you for putting some detail there.

N.B.

1. I had confirmed the mSATA part.

2. I confirmed Linus said a `dongle` (connection unit [PCI-e `3` to mSATA]) is included in a Z87 Maximus IV, which would connect to the PCI-e `3` on that Motherboard for an mSATA SSD.

(A) I still dont know if you can run Windows 8.1 off it or if it is used for swop files or an extension of memory or a place to store games or files or film.

(B) I still dont know if its any better (more reliable/faster) than a normal SSD.

(C) I still don`t know why anyone would want it if they were to use it on an older motherboard with `only` a SATA 2 port (requiring connecting it via PCI-e), when a `known standard` SSD would be the preferred available option.

*Franky it may be too difficult for the public to ever know for sure, and due to that it may not sell well.

& finally;
*The price doesn`t seem to be interesting enough to move people from the Samsung SSD Pro or Evo to that product, as things stand.

By: Les@TheSSDReview

Les@TheSSDReview — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 12:09:00 +0000

In reply to How_delightful. This SSD is an mSATA and plugs in diferently than the 840 Pro and EVO. There may be motherboards with the proper host connector but one must ensure that the connector is a SATA 3 connector, and not SATA 2. Conversely, adapters can be purchased anywhere to plug this in through PCIe...still via SATA 3.