OCZ's Fastest SSD, The IBIS and HSDL Interface Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 29, 2010 12:01 AM ESTNo TRIM, but Garbage Collection
The IBIS drive features a four-controller internal RAID, and there’s currently no way to pass TRIM along to drives in a RAID array, which means its very important to have a resilient controller. OCZ stuck with SandForce and the SF-1200, the most resilient controller on the market today. To make things better however the drive supports idle time garbage collection. With an active NTFS partition on the drive, no IO activity and sufficient free space, the controllers will begin cleaning up the NAND. The effect is profound, below we have a clean drive:
Now, after we've filled the drive and tortured it with random writes:
Note that peak low queue-depth read speed dropped from ~233MB/s down to 120MB/s. Now here’s performance after the drive has been left idle for half an hour:
Remember this is very low queue depth testing so the peak values aren't very high, but it's enough to show the idle garbage collection working.
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punjabiplaya - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
If I understood this correctly, OCZ is just using PCIe signaling over a SAS cable (with accompanying card to demux and pass on to the PCIe lanes)? That's ingenious.davecason - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
This method also makes it easy to port it to a laptop interface through an express card socket.vol7ron - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
Isn't that what PCIe RAID controllers do (minus the SAS cable)?TinyTeeth - Saturday, October 2, 2010 - link
I'm pretty sure they communicate with regular SATA SSD drives through the SATA interface, whereas HSDL brings PCIe all the way to the SSD drive. This would be why IBIS supports much higher IOPS than previous PCIe SSD solutions like the Z-Drive (which were limited by SATA RAID). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this.Ethaniel - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
675 MB/s in sequential write? I just feel sad all of a sudden. SSDs are so forbidden for me right now, but this is a true monster. Maybe they'll make a more "down-to-Earth" version next time. Good stuff, anyway.vol7ron - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
If only I could burn DVDs that fast.Lerianis - Saturday, October 2, 2010 - link
You still burn DVD's? Hell, I stopped doing that a few months ago when I realized that 99% of the stuff I burned was really a 'watch-once and never again' thing and went out to get one of those 2.5" 1TB external hard drives.Haven't burned another DVD since.
rqle - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
too much proprietary peripherals, if i am going to use a PCIe card, I might as well just stick with a revodrive. pcie slots, proprietary slots connectors, proprietary cable, proprietary disk drive interface, blah. ill just stick with their own revodrive for now and wait for sata or sas controllers to pick up speed.jo-82 - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
SAS cabels aren't that expensive these days, and the most companies who would by one of these use them today anyway.And good luck waiting the next 3-5 years or so for SATA 12GB ;)
vol7ron - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - link
Gb, not GB