Intel 910 PCIe SSD Preliminary Benches
The first preliminary Intel 910 PCIe SSD benches are out. It looks pretty solid, but I wonder when the 4 6gbps Intel controllers are going to make it into, you know, a real Intel SSD for people and not datacenters.
It's basically 4 Intel 6gbps 10-channel controllers duct taped to a LSI 9211 and 400GB/800GB of HET-MLC, all in a half-height half-length PCIe card. It shows up as 4 discrete devices, so you can do some combination of RAID with it, though I suppose you could use it as 4 separate drives if you were so inclined. Either way, it's not bootable.
Apparently, there is a way to bump up the power consumption of the drive to get additional write performance, but it seems to only affect sequential writes.
Using all 4 drives in R0 it's rated for 180K read IOPS and 75K write IOPS (for the 800GB). Sequentially, you get 2GB/s reads and 1GB/s writes at the spec'd 25w, but "hot-rodded" at 28w, you can get up to 1.5GB sequential writes. I don't know how big of a deal that is in a server (above spec PCIe power consumption for better sequential writes), but I wouldn't want to do that to (A) the server or (B) the drive. I have some SSDs which get really damn toasty, and they only have 1 controller and no HBA. I imaging you'd probably want to point a fan at the 910.
The 800GB 910 is rated for 14 petabytes of full span 8K random writes or 10 petabytes with full span 4K writes. And that's not terrible -- a 600GB Intel 320 is rated for only 60TB of full span random writes. Considering how damn expensive Intel's 720 SSDs are and how brutally expensive SLC is, at $4,000 it actually seems to be a good deal... for a datacenter.
http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/...s-performance/
