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The Intel X25-V 40GB drive is well known to be one of, if not the best low-cost SSD on the market at the moment. The SSD is basically an Intel X25 G2 drive with TRIM support except with half the NAND flash memory and using only half of the SSD controller channels. The major impact is well known at this point, the Intel X25-V 40GB drives have poor sequential write performance that is approximately half that of the Intel X25-M 80GB. Of course, with two X25-V’s in RAID 0, write speed is essentially doubled and read speed goes well beyond a single drive.

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My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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The Patriot PS-100 32GB continues to be a very low cost SSD after rebates. I purchased two of the drives early on and did both single drive and raid 0 benchmarks. After that I did PS-100 firmware 2.008 benchmarks. Recently, Patriot released a new firmware, v3.000 so I decided to try the flash and see if the claims of better small (4K) reads/ writes were better with the new firmware. I found that they are better, but there is a significant drawback.

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To update to my review of the Supermicro X8SIL-F, I took some Kill-A-Watt power consumption numbers with the Supermicro X8SIL-F to answer a few questions regarding power consumption with real server hardware compared to consumer-level hardware. Below I am focusing on idle power consumption as with the Intel Core i3-530, Xeon X3440, and other LGA 1156 CPUs the CPU utilization while running a NAS application will be very low. After a bit of testing I found the i3-530 again leading the pack in idle power consumption and the Xeon X3440 turning in very respectable idle power consumption numbers.

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I have been using Adaptec products for over a decade, and have generally been a fan (with a few exceptions over the years). My first Windows Home Server was based upon an Adaptec 31605 RAID controller.  Today, PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec’s channel storage business, including their RAID business for $34m USD in cash.

This is probably a sign of things to come in the storage space. I am also guessing some larger players (Dell and HP) will be interested in picking up a few smaller storage vendors in the coming year.

Hopefully PMC-Sierra will have the resources to make some cool controllers in the future. I hope PMC-Sierra continues Adaptec’s MaxIQ SSD caching and expands it to work very well with commodity SSDs.

In the event that you missed it: PMC-Sierra, Inc. Investor Relations – Corporate & Product News Release on Adaptec Business Acquisition

I got a note asking to update my original benchmark for the Patriot PS-100 32GB with results from the new Patriot PS-100 Firmware v2.008. Performance is said to be better and it is!

Update 6 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up.

The specs of the update are:

Firmware update #2.008

• Firmware v2.006 doesn’t support Active Protection feature in Lenovo laptops. Firmware 2.008 fixed it by enabling Active Protection identify bit.
• Some platforms had issue installing Windows 7 into SSD with firmware v2.006. The root cause is partial command will be NAK in background process and bank (0) is not loaded in PRAM. Firmware v2.008 has fixed this issue.
• Firmware v2.006 has power on and loading Windows XP issue with some NVIDIA chipsets. Firmware v2.008 fixed it by changing default setting to MDMA mode 2.
• In Apple Mac Book and Mac Book Pro, sometimes SSD with Firmware v2.006 will fail in reboot. Firmware v2.008 fixed this issue.

Quick Teaser: The results got better!

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Shortly after posting my last benchmarks on the dual OCZ Vertex 120GB in Raid 0 setup, I received an e-mail to try the new Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6.0.1014 drivers, which were supposed to enable TRIM in raid. These new drivers were released, taken down, then re-released in March 2010. The big improvement was supposed to be TRIM is enabled for Raid 0, 1, 10, but not enabled for Raid 5. Unfortuneately, this seems not to be working so the best that can be done is the background garbage collection in firmware v1.5 for OCZ’s Indilinx based SSDs. Since I am only working with two 120GB drives at the moment, I decided to give them a shot. Just for reference, the original benchmarks were done with the standard, off the shelf, Windows 7 64-bit RTM drivers.

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A few weeks ago, I had my main system’s OCZ Vertex 120GB drive die after a Firmware version 1.5 update. After applying the allegedly successful v1.5 firmware update, I started seeing data corruption issues. A few days later, the drive failed to be recognized by any system I own regardless of which onboard SATA controller I tried or even with raid card was used. Just to give an idea of the timeline:

1. Day 0- the SSD drive died, RMA request sent to OCZ (past working hours)
2. Day 1- SSD information such as serial numbers was given to OCZ and a RMA number was issued
3. Day 2 (Friday)- SSD was shipped to OCZ’s San Jose, CA facility (which is <20 miles away)
4. Day 5 (Monday)- SSD was delivered to OCZ
5. Day 9 (Friday)- Another SSD arrived via FedEx from OCZ in shrinkwraped retail packaging

Somewhere in there I ordered another 120GB Vertex from Amazon.com which arrived on Day 8 of the timeline above since I was running out of space anyway.

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I was checking Amazon the other day and saw both the 100GB and 200GB versions of the OCZ Vertex LE are available for pre-order. Both drives are next-gen (as of Feb 2010) performance wise and are said to be shipping sometime late February or early March.

I preordered the 100GB Vertex LE from Amazon.com. I’m guessing it will be available less expensively, but I wanted to get one of the 5,000 before they are sold out. It looks like these are going to be the only low-cost SF-1500 controller based drives for awhile, depending on what Other World Computing (OWC) does with their drives.