World's Fastest Hard Drive?
Original Article Date: 2011-01-19
Earlier this month, I had the privilege of working with what are perhaps the highest
performing commercially available plug and play hard drives for x86-based
computing - the
OCZ Z-Drive R2 p88 PCI-Express SSD
series.
A customer ordered two of these units to go into two GPU-based workstations where
they needed to cache very large amounts of scientific computational data very
rapidly. As terabytes of system RAM would have been prohibitively expensive as
well as physically impossible, the best candidate for this challenging task was
to go with a very high performance and very high capacity
solid state
drive, and the 2TB version of OCZ's Z-Drive R2 p88 series was just
such a drive.
Here's a shot of the drive installed in the workstation:
Firstly, you'll see, this is no ordinary "hard drive". The restrictive SATA bus
is completely bypassed in favor of a direct plug-in to a spare PCI-Express*8
slot. Secondly, you can see that the card is stacked with many MLC flash memory
modules to beef up the total capacity to 2TB.
By coincidence, I happened to also have installed on this same machine an LSI
RAID controller. When setting up this RAID in LSI's MegaRAID Storage Manager
software in Windows, I happened to notice this:
It turns out that the hard drive is actually a RAID0 composite of eight 250GB
SSDs! Now that was a surprise!
So, now to the crunch question. How fast, really, is this drive?
Well, check out this
result from the HD_Speed hard drive benchmark tool:
1.2GB per second? Twelve times faster than the average SATA desktop drive? I
could live with that...
If you'd like to personally share in this experience, you'll find some of the OCZ
extreme performance SSDs listed on every system configuration page
on our website.
But could you really handle the speed? :)
Best regards,
Ben Ranson
Chief Systems Engineer
Electronics Nexus
http://elnexus.com
ben@elnexus.com
1-877-773-5366
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