4 x 16GB Mtron MOBI on the way

[Ender17]

I just bought the same "A Poor Man's Battleship MTRON" setup as SteveRo at OC forums
Highpoint 3520, 4x16GB MTRON Mobi in RAID 0
for about $1100 using this deal http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=846962
Can't wait to get it
First thing I'm gonna test is the Intel ICHR9 controller vs the Highpoint, would be great if the ICHR9 can offer equal performance

[Xel'Naga]

First thing I'm gonna test is the Intel ICHR9 controller vs the Highpoint, would be great if the ICHR9 can offer equal performance

There will be no compsarison between the 2, whatsoever.
Integrated RAID controlers are like having sex with a plank of wood with a hole in it. It may work, but you still end up with splinters in your

[Serra]

Can't wait to see the results, that's going to be one slick system. I don't know how well ICH9R plays with SSD's (you hear the odd issue) - any chance you'll be upgrading to an ICH10R board at some time in the future to test against as well?

That's also a pretty cool deal you got!

I have to ask (and it's not a dig, just an actual question looking for your reaction)...
How does it feel knowing that for what you spent on 64GB of storage with a throughput of ~450MB/s total you could have had 8-9TB of storage with a throughput of 900-1050+MB/s (though with obviously nowhere near the same access times), without using a deal?
Edit: WTF? I went to look up prices on New Egg to see how much better of a deal this would be for you people in the US and for the first time in... I don't know how long, I found out our prices were actually better on 1TB drives! So maybe 7-8TB worth of storage @ 110MB/s average... up to ~900MB/s I guess..

[Serra]

There will be no compsarison between the 2, whatsoever.
Integrated RAID controlers are like having sex with a plank of wood with a hole in it. It may work, but you still end up with splinters in your

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=185579

Yeah, definitely

But we'll see with the SSD's, that may change things on ICH9R. You don't get to see too many comparisons with those.

[Xel'Naga]

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=185579

Yeah, definitely

But we'll see with the SSD's, that may change things on ICH9R. You don't get to see too many comparisons with those.

I agree that RAID 0/1 are not computationally intensive but I doubt the ICH9R will have similar results to the Highpoint. With 2 ty HDDs in RAID 0 they may perform the same, but not with 4 SSDs.
I have to admit that I haven't used any Intel integrated RAID controler but I read a lot about it.
I used NVIDIA though and even in RAID 0/1 the performance was significantly worse than a RAID controler card. Not to mention the reliability....
RAID 1 wouldn't even work (it would write to only one drive) and RAID 0 crashed (and loosing all data) every few months. Good thing I had only OS, Games and some progs on it.

[Serra]

Yeah nvidia is pretty well fail for raid.

I expect the throughput to be ok but the access time to go up,assuming it works right in the first place, but we will see.

[Omarko]

I had a look at that thread but cant see the deal there .... can you link me to the exact post ? is it available to overseas buyers ?

I was just about to buy couple 32GBs of Mobi's @$449 each from one online shop.

PS: I think it will make bugger all diff between HW raid controller and onboard ICH .... its raid-0 we are talking about .... not 5 or 10 ... makes no diff ... its been proven over and over with many benchmarks ..

[Ender17]

Can't wait to see the results, that's going to be one slick system. I don't know how well ICH9R plays with SSD's (you hear the odd issue) - any chance you'll be upgrading to an ICH10R board at some time in the future to test against as well?

That's also a pretty cool deal you got!

I have to ask (and it's not a dig, just an actual question looking for your reaction)...
How does it feel knowing that for what you spent on 64GB of storage with a throughput of ~450MB/s total you could have had 8-9TB of storage with a throughput of 900-1050+MB/s (though with obviously nowhere near the same access times), without using a deal?
Edit: WTF? I went to look up prices on New Egg to see how much better of a deal this would be for you people in the US and for the first time in... I don't know how long, I found out our prices were actually better on 1TB drives! So maybe 7-8TB worth of storage @ 110MB/s average... up to ~900MB/s I guess..

Well I've already got 5 x WD 1TB drives and 4 x Seagate 750GB drives. I don't need that much space. Gonna put the 5 WD 1TB drives in RAID5 in a separate machine. 4TB should be plenty, and I'll put one of the 750GB drives in an external enclosure for backups of the important stuff.

Access time is the key thing, hard drives just can't compete in that aspect. I would have probably bought a few VelociRaptors too, but couldn't find an auction for them that would give cash back.

I'm hoping 64GB will be enough room for main machine - just OS and apps, nothing else. I might toss one of those 750GB Seagate drives in here too just to have some local space, but everything will be saved on the fileserver.

I might change to a ICH10R board, especially if it could match this $400 RAID card, do you have info that ICH10R is better than ICH9R?

I had a look at that thread but cant see the deal there .... can you link me to the exact post ? is it available to overseas buyers ?

I was just about to buy couple 32GBs of Mobi's @$449 each from one online shop.

PS: I think it will make bugger all diff between HW raid controller and onboard ICH .... its raid-0 we are talking about .... not 5 or 10 ... makes no diff ... its been proven over and over with many benchmarks ..

It's US only. I also considered the 32GB SSDs since they were slightly cheaper per GB, but you lose a lot of the bandwidth - would only be getting 200/160 MB/s instead of 400/320 MB/s.

[Buckeye]

I just bought the same "A Poor Man's Battleship MTRON" setup as SteveRo at OC forums
Highpoint 3520, 4x16GB MTRON Mobi in RAID 0
for about $1100 using this deal http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=846962
Can't wait to get it
First thing I'm gonna test is the Intel ICHR9 controller vs the Highpoint, would be great if the ICHR9 can offer equal performance

Congratz !!!

You will love it

[Ender17]

you think I could get away with putting them in here and leaving the fans off?
http://www.startech.com/item/SATABAY...r-525-Bay.aspx

[Buckeye]

Thats a nice drive case. Not sure how the connections go through to the motherboard if you use the back plane on that.

But my MTRON PRO's do not even get hot, in fact they are cold as ice, well almost that cold So no fans needed.

[IanB]

PS: I think it will make bugger all diff between HW raid controller and onboard ICH .... its raid-0 we are talking about .... not 5 or 10 ... makes no diff ... its been proven over and over with many benchmarks ..

You are wrong. It's not just about the efficiency of the non-parity vs. parity RAID. For ICH9R there is a known problem with SSDs that manifests as an effective bandwidth cap on each device, restricting RAID throughput. A good offboard hardware controller will not be capped, but you need a really good one for upwards of 6 or 7 SSDs.

Many of us are still waiting for someone to confirm whether this bug is fixed in ICH10R...

[Ender17]

You are wrong. It's not just about the efficiency of the non-parity vs. parity RAID. For ICH9R there is a known problem with SSDs that manifests as an effective bandwidth cap on each device, restricting RAID throughput. A good offboard hardware controller will not be capped, but you need a really good one for upwards of 6 or 7 SSDs.

Many of us are still waiting for someone to confirm whether this bug is fixed in ICH10R...

well I just ordered a P5Q Deluxe, so I'll let you know

[Serra]

I might change to a ICH10R board, especially if it could match this $400 RAID card, do you have info that ICH10R is better than ICH9R?

Awesome setup. Once you already have the capacity, going for the speed = win.

As far as ICH9R vs ICH10R - I have no idea. It just wouldn't overly surprise me if ICH9R happened to not play overly well with SSD's, and it would make sense for ICH10R to be ready for them.

[Ender17]

I got the SSDs today, but not the Highpoint 3520. Decided to go ahead and see what results I would get with the onboard ICH9R and also my old Highpoint 2320.
So far, the results are pretty bad. I don't know if I'm going something wrong or not.



Asus Rampage Formula
Q9450
2 x 2GB Corsair DDR2
8800 GTS 512 MB
Highpoint 2320
boot drive OCZ SSD 2 32 GB
Corsair 620W HX
4 x Mtron 3000 Mobi 3000 16 GB
Vista Ultimate

[Buckeye]

I belive your problem could be with the Asus Rampage Formula, I have hread there are problems with some intel chipsets. I will try and find what I remember seeing about this and post back.

Also is BIOS fully updatedon the Rampage ?

Next, do you have Write Back enabled ?

Have you gotten new updated drivers for the HighPoint ?

When you do the bench tests do a full restart and let the machine sit for a minute until all process settle down, then run the test and do not touch the mouse or keyboard while the test is running.

Ok unclear if your screen shot there is with the ICH9 chipset or the Highpoint ?
There are many problems when using the ICH9 chipset and SSD Raids.

[Ender17]

I belive your problem could be with the Asus Rampage Formula, I have hread there are problems with some intel chipsets. I will try and find what I

remember seeing about this and post back.

Also is BIOS fully updatedon the Rampage ?

Next, do you have Write Back enabled ?

Have you gotten new updated drivers for the HighPoint ?

When you do the bench tests do a full restart and let the machine sit for a minute until all process settle down, then run the test and do not touch the mouse or keyboard

while the test is running.

Ok unclear if your screen shot there is with the ICH9 chipset or the HighPoint ?
There are many problems when using the ICH9 chipset and SSD Raids.

Status:

Updated Rampage Formulua BIOS to 0308
Updated HighPoint 2320 BIOS to 1.7
Write Back is not an option on the HighPoint 2320. The only setting I can change is Read Ahead - changing it does not affect results.
Write Cache appears to be an option, but clicking Disable does nothing.
The screen shot above shows both the Intel ICH9R (blue) and HighPoint 2320 (red) results.
Checked the firmware on the SSDs - it is 0.17R1, the latest available.
HighPoint 2320, Intel Matrix Storage, and Intel Chipset drives are all the latest versions available.



I hooked up 3 Western Digital Green Power 1TB drives to see what kind of results I would get.
3 x WD GP 1TB RAID0 on HighPoint 2320



There is no way these drives should be faster than the SSDs.



One thing I've noticed is the Mtron SSDs show up as ATA/133 under Transfer Mode in the HighPoint RAID Management Console (screen shot below).
Is that normal? They are SATA 150. The Green Power drives show as SATA 300 as they should.






I was out of ideas with the HighPoint 2320, so I went back to the Intel ICH9R.
I decided to turn on Write-Back Caching, as it is available on this controller.
The results look great, but I don't know if they're accurate - read speeds are over 400 MB/s (with 4 x 100 MB/s drives?!), write speeds aren't as smooth, and burst rates are astronomical.
I also started playing around with the stripe size, another variable I couldn't adjust on the HighPoint.

128KB Stripe Write Back Cache On






16KB Stripe Write Back Cache On






16KB Stripe Write Back Cache Off






Small stripe sizes (16KB, 8KB, 4KB) are all pretty equal and seem to produce the smoothest results.
However, these are still short of the theoretical 400 MB/s read and 320 MB/s write speeds I should be seeing.
I'm out of ideas. My HighPoint 3520 should be here early next week, I'm curious as to what kind of results I will see with it.

One more thing. The Intel Matrix Storage Console shows NCQ as off. Is this normal? How can I enable it?

[Serra]

I see it says CPU usage = 100%. I think you might be hitting a processor bottleneck. This is not normal for even 4x drive RAID-0 regular drives, so there's definitely some kind of issue here. I'm sure there's a reason, but frankly I'm just too tired to think it out right now.

I do notice though that your 128k stripe size results seem to show the highest read/write results, much more than the 16k stripe sizes. Perhaps the low access times, coupled with the increased frequency in going from stripe to stripe has something to do with it. As far as the burst rates go, yeah... I pretty well just ignore burst rates for many reasons.

This is one of the issues with onboard & SSD's - they really just don't generally play well. Perhaps ICH10R is better, but I suppose we're going to have to wait a bit for conclusive results.

[Buckeye]

For my setup using 64k stripes gave me the best results, smaller stripe sizes performance was worse, and going to the largest of 128k and that showed no real differance from 64k so in the end I left it at default of 64k.

Finally found the links

http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...&enterthread=y

and here

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3064&p=4

"Beyond that, as we found out with the MTRON drive your choice of core logic chipset can make a difference in the overall performance of the drive. Exactly why the latest Intel desktop chipsets have an apparent 80 MB/sec ceiling for sustained transfer rates with the SSD products is still a mystery to us and the drive manufacturers. We are still testing other Intel chipsets and will report these tests results and any updates from Intel or the drive manufacturers in our next article. In the meantime, using this drive with the Intel ICH9R provides the speed of Wile E. Coyote while we liken the NVIDIA 680i to the Road Runner: just a little faster and apparently a little smarter when it comes to SSD products."

[Ender17]

I see it says CPU usage = 100%. I think you might be hitting a processor bottleneck. This is not normal for even 4x drive RAID-0 regular drives, so there's definitely some kind of issue here. I'm sure there's a reason, but frankly I'm just too tired to think it out right now.

I do notice though that your 128k stripe size results seem to show the highest read/write results, much more than the 16k stripe sizes. Perhaps the low access times, coupled with the increased frequency in going from stripe to stripe has something to do with it. As far as the burst rates go, yeah... I pretty well just ignore burst rates for many reasons.

This is one of the issues with onboard & SSD's - they really just don't generally play well. Perhaps ICH10R is better, but I suppose we're going to have to wait a bit for conclusive results.

I didn't notice the CPU usage at 100%. That's weird, if you look back at the HD Tach results, they only show 2% utilization.
I don't understand why there is an issue with the ICH9R controller - I mean what is different about a SSD vs a hard drive as far as it is concerned?
Anyway, my P5Q Deluxe with ICH10R and my HighPoint 3250 are both coming next week, so I'll resume testing then.

I believe the HighPoint 3520 has the same processor as the Areca 1261 - an Intel IOP341. However, it runs at 800MHz, compared to 1200MHz like some of the other cards.
I don't know why I didn't order the Adaptec 5405 (runs at 1200MHz). This review shows it dominating at RAID0
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/rai...red?page=0%2C4
and I had seen that before, just forgot about it I guess.
I realize the 5405 is only a 4 port card, but that's really all I need. Guess I could have ordered the HighPoint 3510 since it's the 4 port equivelant of the 3520. I didn't know how long that eBay deal was going to last so I ordered kinda quickly without thinking too much I guess.
Anyway, I think I'm gonna go ahead and order the Adaptec 5405 and then I can do my own testing
I got such a deal on the HighPoint 3520, I'll be able to sell it off without losing any money.

[stevecs]

From doing some basic testing so far here between the ARC-1280ML (IOP341 @ 800Mhz) and the ARC-1680ix-24 (IOP348 @ 1.2Ghz) on a raid-6 array of 24 1TB ST1000340NS drives, I've found that the ARC-1280ML is actually a little faster in performance (random IOPS & Streaming) (about 5% or so) than the 1680ix card. I didn't have the time to run a full gamut of tests that I would have liked though so at this point take it with a grain of salt. If anything the numbers were within statistical error.

[Buckeye]

From doing some basic testing so far here between the ARC-1280ML (IOP341 @ 800Mhz) and the ARC-1680ix-24 (IOP348 @ 1.2Ghz) on a raid-6 array of 24 1TB ST1000340NS drives, I've found that the ARC-1280ML is actually a little faster in performance (random IOPS & Streaming) (about 5% or so) than the 1680ix card. I didn't have the time to run a full gamut of tests that I would have liked though so at this point take it with a grain of salt. If anything the numbers were within statistical error.

I can confirm your information on the ARC-1231ML.

If I my ask Steve what motherboard are you using with the ARC-1231ML ?

[stevecs]

I tested the ARC1280 & ARC1680ix's with the Asus P5W64 WS Pro MB in my .sig with the C2D Q6850.

[Buckeye]

I tested the ARC1280 & ARC1680ix's with the Asus P5W64 WS Pro MB in my .sig with the C2D Q6850.

Ah right I didn't even think to look at your sig. sorry about that

It's great to hear that the ICH9R controller issue can be done away with by using the Acera's.

[Ender17]

HighPoint 3520
Got a couple things to iron out:
1) Can't seem to update the firmware on the HighPoint 3520. The flash utility for Windows just won't run. Tried running in compatibility mode for Windows XP like I had to do when I flashed my Highpoint 2320, but that didn't work.
2) I think port 1 is bad on the card. When I connect the SSDs to it, nothing shows up on port 1-6. Port 2 works fine. Guess I will have to RMA it.

I'm not going to order the Adaptec, I'm perfectly happy with this level of performance. I am thinking of "downgrading" to a Highpoint 3510 though since I only need 4 ports.