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A week ago SanDisk announced a $327 million deal to acquire Pliant Technology, I believe this is only the first step in SanDisk’s strategy. SanDisk is already well known as a top tier supplier of NAND based memory products including Secure Digital cards, compact flash, and USB memory. Although SanDisk’s brand does carry a premium in the marketplace, the company faces fierce competition from a myriad of vendors because flash memory utilizing standard interfaces has become a fairly commoditized market. Unlike other vendors, SanDisk has a joint venture with Toshiba for manufacturing raw NAND, something that many of the generic competition cannot match. Read the full story

Corsair’s Performance 3 series is a newer SATA III 6.0gbps drive that offers quite a bit of performance utilizing a Marvell controller. Marvell has been making a splash lately on SSD controllers. The Micron C300 held the performance crown for almost a year as its competitors were capped by SATA II bandwidth constraints. Today we will look at the Corsair Performance 3 Series P3-128 drive that utilizes custom tweaked firmware and does achieve speeds well above what SATA II can offer. Note this is the same physical controller used in the Intel 510 SSD released this week. Read the full story

One thing that virtually every major storage player and enterprise has been using for the past few years, and is continuing to use, is a tiered storage approach. This is mainly due to the fact that lower capacity, higher-cost drives tend to have higher performance than larger and less expensive alternatives. The basic premise is to have the most frequently used data stored in the fastest accessible physical storage so that more transactional requests can be accomplished quickly. Augmenting this fast storage is lower cost, high-capacity storage that keeps less frequently stored data online. This guide is meant to be a primer on how this works in a few common scenarios for small businesses and home servers. It should be noted that for home servers primarily storing media files, tiered storage makes less sense since waiting a second or two extra to do hours of relatively low bandwidth sequential transfers is not taxing on storage subsystems. Read the full story

At the request of some users, I am putting together a few bits of storage news from the past week. If the response is positive, I may make this a weekly Friday digest. Read the full story

Today I am taking a look at the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB Sandforce SFF-1222 based SSD. Two things that should be clarified at the outset are that the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB and the ADATA S599 64GB both have the same formatted capacity (55.8GBs) and that there is no perceivable real-world difference between the drives. The difference between the 60GB and 64GB drives is due to marketing semantics rather than physical differences. Second, I have used both drives quite a bit over the past few weeks, and I use Indilinx and Intel X25-M G2 drives regularly as well both in servers and on all notebooks and desktops. Frankly, each controller exhibits different characteristics that one can see easily using a suite of benchmarking software. Those benchmark differences are not translating to real-world performance advantages for one controller over another at this point. Read the full story

I have been doing a bit of testing recently with the LSI SAS 2008 based controllers such as the 9211-8i in RAID 0 with various SSDs. Recently I took eight 64GB ADATA S599 Sandforce based SSDs and placed them in RAID 0 on the LSI 9211-8i. I was expecting maximum transfer rates in excess of 2GB/s in ATTO. What I saw instead was a performance anomaly. Read the full story

One recent contact form question was regarding the alleged 660MB/s limitation on the Intel ICH10R chipset (also known as the 82801JR I/O controller), especially in conjunction with X58 based chipsets which currently represent the big iron of Intel’s lineup until the LGA 2011 parts come out in Q3 or Q4 2011. When the ICH10R was released in 2008, there was little need for more than 660MB/s as SSDs were still not hitting the SATA II bandwidth caps. When platter drives peaked around 120MB/s having a six port (one likely occupied by an optical drive) that could put out 660MB/s was fine. In 2010, 660MB/s is barely more than two ~$100 SSDs can put out. With all of that being said, I decided to throw the stable of ADATA S599 64GB drives at the ICH10R and see what they could do. Read the full story

Recently, I updated the benchmark numbers on this site to include an Intel X25-M G2 80GB but alluded to having two drives free. Instead of doing a “standard” X25-M G2 80GB in RAID 0 piece, I decided to look at something I get asked quite often, Intel ICH10R/ ICH9R RAID 0 or Windows Software RAID 0 (stripe) for SSDs. To compare the X25-M G2 80GB numbers below with the Indilinx and Intel X25-V 40GB numbers found on this site, one should use the ICH10R numbers contained within. Read the full story

Although Intel will be releasing the X25-M G3 SSDs in the next few months, I get asked frequently to provide some X25-M G2 numbers for comparison with the other SSD benchmarks on this site. As I am currently working on a new NAS testbed, I had two Intel X25-M G2 80GB‘s that got freed up and I am able to provide some numbers. Read the full story

One of the most annoying things in SSDs these days is the fact that virtually every manufacturer uses mail-in rebates to make their SSDs appear more affordable. The ADATA S599 64GB is based on the Sandforce SF-1222 controller like many other popular Sandforce consumer drives such as the OCZ Agility 2 and OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair Force, Patriot Inferno, and G.Skill Phoenix Pro. With the internals being largely the same between manufacturers the two main differentiators are warranty and price. Since I needed an additional drive for a ZFS L2ARC SSD for my NexentaCore + napp-it build, I decided to go with another Sandforce based drive. The ADATA’s low price and lack of a mail-in rebate attracted me immediately. The big question I had was whether the ADATA S599 would perform as well as my OCZ Agility 2 which I reviewed earlier.

A few things should be mentioned off the bat. First, the ADATA S599 retail package comes with a blue 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter. For those that need one, this is a great bonus for a SSD that costs just over $100.

Second, the SSD may advertise being 64GB, but after the 1,000 to 1,024 base conversion, and formatting are taken into account, the usable drive size is actually 55.8GB usable. That is not bad, it is just a lot lower than some users may expect. Read the full story