SSD SATA Recommendation

[Zenmastur]

a 3 or 4 drive raid array with 10-15Gb/sec and ~3,000,000 IOPS sustained is likely needed.

Does it really exist such kind of controller? Which interface bus will it use?

My MB has 3 M.2 PCIe Ver.4 slots that can be made into a raid array. ASUS also produces a card that can handle 4 M.2 PCIe Ver.3 drives that can be raided.

So, the short answer is yes, there are cards that can do that. The ASUS card is only $60 or so. You have to be careful when buying a card. Most cards can't split the PCIe lanes of a single slot (i.e. 16X slot is split into 4 x 4X PCIe lanes.) Some high end motherboards, like those for Threadrippers can split the lanes for the card so, a cheaper card (that can't split the lanes) can be used.

One other note, 4TB M.2 drives are now available. See one here:
https://www.newegg.com/sabrent-rocket-n ... klink=true



Regards,

Zenmastur

[yurikvelo]

ASUS also produces a card that can handle 4 M.2 PCIe Ver.3 drives that can be raided.

I was asking about 10-15Gb/sec and ~3,000,000 IOPS, not about acting 4 drives as single and not about volume.

Which interface bus use controller capable of 15 Gb/sec and 3 megaIOPS?
Does it support 4x RAID-0 configuration? (interleave of 4 drives, not 2 drives?)

[Zenmastur]

ASUS also produces a card that can handle 4 M.2 PCIe Ver.3 drives that can be raided.

I was asking about 10-15Gb/sec and ~3,000,000 IOPS, not about acting 4 drives as single and not about volume.

Which interface bus use controller capable of 15 Gb/sec and 3 megaIOPS?
Does it support 4x RAID-0 configuration? (interleave of 4 drives, not 2 drives?)

The PCIe V.4 bus is sufficient to handle the required transfer speed. Each controller on the M.2 cards are capable of 750,000 IOPS (see the PCIe V.4 Sabrent cards for specs) I know the specs are true as I have one of these cards and have run tests on it. It's faster than any other card I've seen. If the requests are random then each M.2 card will on average receive one third (or one fourth) the requests, depending on configuration. Since there are more requests than there are resources to full fill them, there will be a que of pending requests for each of the 3 or 4 drives. Therefore, the drives should saturate at their maximum IOPS. There are video's of tests on Youtube that show the performance of various configurations, although they are old video's. The newer PCIe Ver.4 drives should handily out perform the arrays shown in most video.

Regards,

Zenmastur

[yurikvelo]

If the requests are random

So, actually 15 Gb/sec and 3 megaIOPS controllers with RAID 0+0+0+0 (4x interleave) won't exist in near future and the only hope is random distribution of RTB files on individual drives

Is PCI-E architecture really multi-thread scalable?
If you put several 700 000 IOPS in separate PCI-E slots and run simultaneous benchmark, will they still show 700 000 IOPS each?

[Zenmastur]

If the requests are random

So, actually 15 Gb/sec and 3 megaIOPS controllers with RAID 0+0+0+0 (4x interleave) won't exist in near future and the only hope is random distribution of RTB files on individual drives

Is PCI-E architecture really multi-thread scalable?
If you put several 700 000 IOPS in separate PCI-E slots and run simultaneous benchmark, will they still show 700 000 IOPS each?

They don't need to be totally random. pseudo-random is good enough since many requests will be satisfied by data already in memory AND the que depth can be as high as 32 per drive. This is sufficient to saturate the controller on each drive.

I suggest you take a look at some of the video's on you tube, where they build and test these configurations. Even though many of these video's are a couple years old and use older, slower (by current standards) drives several of them are close to 10GB/sec. This was before PCIe V.4 was available ( doubles the available bandwidth and halves the transfer latency) and before controllers capable of 750,000 IOPS existed. i.e. you don't need to believe me you can go look for yourself!

Example cards:

https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-model-g ... lsrc=aw.ds

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-model-hyp ... klink=true

Regards,

Zenmastur

[yurikvelo]

I know about speed of SSD or speed of PCI-E.

I ask whether exist any RAID controller which has at least any one of this feature:

1) support RAID-0 with more than 2x interleave, 4x 0+0+0+0 interleave. No matter slow or fast, just supporting this kind of logical configuration.
2) any RAID controller capable of 15 Gb/sec
3) any RAID controller capable of 3 megaIOPS

[Zenmastur]

I know about speed of SSD or speed of PCI-E.

I ask whether exist any RAID controller which has at least any one of this feature:

1) support RAID-0 with more than 2x interleave, 4x 0+0+0+0 interleave. No matter slow or fast, just supporting this kind of logical configuration.
2) any RAID controller capable of 15 Gb/sec
3) any RAID controller capable of 3 megaIOPS

Did you even bother looking at the links to the cards I posted? Read the first one, it has performance specs half way down the page along with some informations on tests conditions. This isn't rocket science. If you can't figure it out from there I think it's a personal problem that I can't help you with.

Regards,

Zenmastur

[yurikvelo]

Did you even bother looking at the links to the cards I posted? Read the first one

I did. Also I've downloaded PDF Manual from manufacturer.

It states it's not a RAID at all. It's just piece of plastic to mechanically handle up to 4 M.2 cards.
Each M.2 card is traced to x4 number of lanes.
That is exactly the same as put 4 individual M.2 cards into 4 individual x4 ports on motherboard.


https://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/ ... 191022.pdf
Which Raid modes are supported ( Raid 0, 1, 5 , 10 )? The card is a simple M.2 extension card, RAID support depends on the platform it is installed on.

it has performance specs

for 3 of my questions answer is:
1) Does it support RAID 0+0+0+0 4x interleave? No, it doesn't support any configuration, even 2x interleave since it is not RAID at all
2) Does it have 15 Gb/sec speed? No, it has zero speed as it is just mechanical adapter for x4 lanes. x4 lanes do not have neither 15 Gb/sec nor 10 Gb/sec speed
3) Does it have 3 megaIOPS? No. it has zero IOPS as it is just mechanical adapter. If you combine 700 000 IOPS with 700 000 IOPS you will have 700 000 IOPS as second drive will never get accessed, unless you can randomly distribute files between two and your use scenarion can randomly access both.

[Zenmastur]

Did you even bother looking at the links to the cards I posted? Read the first one

I did. Also I've downloaded PDF Manual from manufacturer.

It states it's not a RAID at all. It's just piece of plastic to mechanically handle up to 4 M.2 cards.
Each M.2 card is traced to x4 number of lanes.
That is exactly the same as put 4 individual M.2 cards into 4 individual x4 ports on motherboard.


https://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/ ... 191022.pdf
Which Raid modes are supported ( Raid 0, 1, 5 , 10 )? The card is a simple M.2 extension card, RAID support depends on the platform it is installed on.

it has performance specs

for 3 of my questions answer is:
1) Does it support RAID 0+0+0+0 4x interleave? No, it doesn't support any configuration, even 2x interleave since it is not RAID at all
2) Does it have 15 Gb/sec speed? No, it has zero speed as it is just mechanical adapter for x4 lanes. x4 lanes do not have neither 15 Gb/sec nor 10 Gb/sec speed
3) Does it have 3 megaIOPS? No. it has zero IOPS as it is just mechanical adapter. If you combine 700 000 IOPS with 700 000 IOPS you will have 700 000 IOPS as second drive will never get accessed, unless you can randomly distribute files between two and your use scenarion can randomly access both.

I guess it's too difficult for you to figure out on your own. Raid 0, is striping. You don't need any special hardware to do it. So they provide a software engine called the AORUS Storage Manager that sets up the stripping for you. I assume there is a runtime driver that loads into memory that controls the array during normal operation and a utility to setup and manage the array. Since there is no parity to generate or other complicated structures, software works just fine. Like I said, It's not rocket science.

Regards,

Zenmastur

[yurikvelo]

a 3 or 4 drive raid array with 10-15Gb/sec and ~3,000,000 IOPS sustained is likely needed

so actually we are talking about software RAID-0 (under Windows it will be 99% built-in raid support, Aorus just GUI front-end)

Here they tested Samsung 983 DCT (1TB, NVME PCIE x4 version)

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... -Pro-1369/
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/m ... er/983dct/

Standalone Samsung SSD has 400-440 kIOPS (4KB, QD32)

Under software RAID IOPS degraded with some hardware to as low as 45...75k IOPS and best result peaked at 152k IOPS ( X299 chipset + ASUS HYPER M.2 x16 card)

That is less than 35% of standalone perfomance (if you are lucky with chipset).

And we do not mention yet CPU/RAM load during this operations.