Comments on: Patriot Wildfire SATA 3 SSD Performance Testing – Conclusions

By: Vassil

Vassil — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:56:00 +0000

Nice article! Actually, after spending so much on the hardware, you could invest another $200 to get the optional LSI FastPath(tm) Feature key. Then, and only then, the LSI HBA will show its full potential with SSDs. Check this out: https://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/RAID%20Controllers/RAID%20Controllers%20Common%20Files/MR-SAS_9265-9285_Performance_Brief_022511.pdf

By: Stall3

Stall3 — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:13:00 +0000

Thank you. Great information. This rig you setup is excellent. I would love to run a RAID 10 SSD setup. I would love even more if I could dream up a dual controller setup so I could have redundant drives, and a redundant controller/HBA’s. In the enterprise world I setup linux mpp multipathing to dual controllers. If a disk fails, raid 10 has my back, if a controller fails, mpp has my back.

By: stas

stas — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:13:41 +0000

Hi Paul
Quite broaden answer from you.
This next spec of SATA is known on the web as SATA Express. If I got you right, connection of 8 these Wildfires straight to PCI-e bus would have shown, presumably, better performance due to less overhead that PCI-e controller causes in comparison to SATA3 controller.
What is known is that SATA Express allows for 8 and 16Gbps bandwidth. Basing on this, we would see higher sequential read/writes definitely.
As for me, I intend to replace that bulky PC in favour of notebook at last. That is why I will be rather looking for the next AMD APUs on the market.
We are left only to survive till the time when SATA Express motherboard’s are out. I wish that advancements in computing technologies would be occurring faster from that that it takes…This is a no way to wait for years to witness the next CPU and so on..

By: Paul Alcorn

Paul Alcorn — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 21:46:33 +0000

In reply to stas.

The thing is when you are writing to, or reading from, and array of SSDs at a 4K QD of 1, you are only accessing 1 disk per request. So think of it as this: you are only requesting 1 individual 4K file, repeatedly. This request will be answered by one device only. These results were obtained using write-through, which does not leverage write caching.
If the QD were higher, say 2 or 4 or 16, then those would be requests that are issued simultaneously, and thus answered buy a number of disks.
The best that any storage solution, be it onboard or hardware RAID, can do is simply not add latency to the request of QD1 4k. All methods of connections have their overhead, be it sata, IDE, etc…The 9265 has very great latency that is not hampered by as much overhead, as it is shooting across the PCIe bus, and they have finely tuned Firmware. Most of your loss of performance in 4kQD1 is merely firmware and bus overhead. The 9265 is a superb device here, and this is very telling that the results we see at QD1 are so high. This is a huge part of the reasoning behind the conclusion remarks about latency. The better the latency of the host, the better that the underlying device itself can respond.
This is a fun review, but it also has much to be gained even from casual users. This can be informative about the gains to be had from different types of solutions. I know many guys with 4-6 and sometimes 8 SSDs on a host of different RAID cards, and they are constantly looking for that next level of performance. Especially in the video editing and photography realms, which tbh many casual users are getting there with the abundance of HD video for us ‘normal’ people these days!
Also, the next spec of SATA will include a direct connection to the PCIe bus for SSD/HDD devices. TRULY very exciting for this storage nerd, but it will allow for all of us to see the true base latency of these devices on the market, and that is where testing like this will be great for future reference as well.
Look for that coming to a motherboard near you by this time next year!

By: stas

stas — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 19:59:48 +0000

4KB-writes don’t improve much on RAID-0, comparing to a single Wildfire 120GB performance review. That is 30.85/72.82 MB/sec. of 4KB-read/write in RAID-0 versus 16.80/58.05 MB/sec. of 4KB-read/write of a single Wildfire 120GB (AS SSD results). As found on other sites, Vertex 3 120GB shows 20.00/72.41 MB/sec. of 4KB-read/write in AS SSD – close to RAID performance.
Anyway, this review will be useful for server-builders mostly, and entertaining for us.