OCZ Consumer & Enterprise SSD Technology Including Linux Caching Linus Tech Tips CES 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,856 words · ~9 min read
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welcome to lus Tech tips at CES 2013 our trip to the show this year is powered by
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Corsair maker of quality PC components and peripherals our trusted storage
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partner is Seagate technology and our trusted networking partner is
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linkis in the ocz Suite on the consumer side we start with the vertex 3 so this
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is a sand Force based Drive honestly the problem with something like a San Force
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based drive at this point in time is that pretty much everyone in their dog
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has a s Force drive so you just have to rely on add-ons like extra warranty or
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you know just that sort of the the General brand perception in order to
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drive sales so Vertex 4 was an obvious
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an obvious thing for ocz to do after they acquired indel links it does use a
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thirdparty controller the actual physical controller on the chip but it
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uses an IND linkx firmware so they're calling that the Everest 2 platform and
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it achieves performance that in almost any case is as good as the vertex 3 but
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in cases where you're dealing with incompressible data is actually better so it's a more consistent experience
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right here we have the latest drive that ocz's launched so these two are going to
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be the ones that are more focused on moving forwards with their indel linkx
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technology inside this one not only uses an indel linkx firmware to control the
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SSD itself but it also has the Barefoot 3 controller which is the first silicon
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that was actually designed inhouse by ocz to deliver the best possible
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performance this drive took something along the lines of 18 months to bring to
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Market market so they were already working on this 6 months before CES last
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year it has a 5-year warranty and it has industry-leading performance it is right
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up there with any other 2 and 1 half inch SSD drive because that is pretty
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much as good as we can do for a 2 half inch SATA 3 drive at this point because
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the SATA interface is getting pretty close to the limit so let's talk about
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what we can do if we move beyond the SATA interface now we've seen Revo Drive
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products from ocz in the past and they're doing away with that branding
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this time or maybe they're not it looks like there's a oh yeah specifications
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are preliminary and subject to change so this is the vector PCIe this is going to
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use two indel linkx Barefoot 3 controllers it uses 32 nand chips it
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comes with cloning software it has a 5year warranty it's going to be available in capacities up to one
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terabyte and it uses a PCI Express Gen 2
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4X interface giving it a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2 GB per second now
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in the real world it's capable of achieving about 1 gab per second and
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you're going to see that on the screen to my right your left but there's a lot
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of overhead involved in the PCI Express interface so really to get ahead of this
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in terms of performance they'd either have to add more Lanes making it an adex
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card or move to PCIe gen 3 now with
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these storage devices there's a lot of validation that goes into them because
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most PCI Express slots on motherboards on the motherboard manufacturer side are
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only really validated with mainstream stuff like graphics cards and sound
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cards so in the past there have been some finicky issues so moving ahead to
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the newest technology that at this point is only even supported on Intel and not
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even on the AMD side might not have made sense and honestly looking at previous
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generation products you didn't see the same kind of scaling going from two
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controllers to four controllers that you saw going from 1 to two So speaking of
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the performance scaling from 1 to two you can see that compared to what a
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single Drive is able to do on the SATA 3 interface we're able to see consist
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consant performance above sort of anything above about 32 kilobytes where
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you're sitting around well still above 800 megabytes per second reads and wrs
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this drive can consistently deliver about a th000 megabytes per second reads
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and rights so this is comparable to something that I had to build for myself
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using an LSI card that cost me about 700 bucks and back in the San Force One days
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I needed eight drives to achieve that kind of performance so we're only a few
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Generations ahead of that but we're already looking at performance that's
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basically space age compared to what we had not that long ago in our Vector SSD
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unboxing we talked about how OC is changing their image redefining their
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processes internally and trying to refocus right now so let's have a look
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at sort of the the existing generation of Enterprise ssds I don't know if you
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guys are familiar with these or not but this one was actually at CES last year
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already it's available in up to 3.2 terabyte capacities and I know the
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internet loves to talk about sort of the one tbte drives that are out are coming
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out or but the reality of it is ocz's had things like you know 3.2 terab
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drives on PCIe 800 terab drives using a
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sass interface on uh on 2 and a half inch form factor for actually quite a
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while now so it's um it's interesting I
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mean this is this is all that stuff that we've seen before but I have Jerome here
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from ocz to tell us about something that's actually all new and uses unlike
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these previous generation Solutions which are using sandforce controllers
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sandforce uh sand Force driven kind of firmware Updates this guy right here is
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actually using ocz's own intellectual property so tell us about the Intrepid 3
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right so thanks so this is our intrepret 3 product this is our next Generation
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SATA product so as you mentioned this is using our in-house controller our
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Everest 2 controller and this is going to be an evolution of our existing set
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of products like our Geneva 2 so with Intrepid 3 you're going to get higher
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performance for sequential also higher per performance for random input output
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operations per second and this one's also optimized for Inc compress ible
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data Thea 2 is optimized for compressible andreid 3 is going to give
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you really great performance with incompressible data so these two solutions are potentially complimentary
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to each other yes that's okay so I mean
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it's there's a lot of guys that make ssds so I think the differentiation
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really comes from a few different factors so number one is the variety of
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the solutions number two is going to be the support that's provided number three
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quality of the components that are being used and number four is going to be sort
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of how you guys differentiate eles in the market and sort of that that X
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Factor thing so this is something we discussed on our live stream we do live
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streams every Friday night uh when ocz announced this but ocz has a solution
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now for accelerating volumes whether it's using a PCIe solution a SATA
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solution a SAS Solution on Linux platforms as well as uh what other
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platforms so why don't you tell us uh we're going to wait for this demo to
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restart at the beginning and we're going to get drum to walk us through it okay
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so here we're showing ocz's new solution for acceleration this is our lxl
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platform so what we're doing here is we're showing in our Storage Pro XEL
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management software you can see we have the neeva and a z Drive uh ocz volumes
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uh installed and what we're doing here is we're selecting the existing volumes
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that you want to accelerate so we're picking the ocz volumes here as cache
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volumes and our lxl software automatically you know uh
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prediscovery done so far is we've already selected the ocz volumes to be
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used as cach now we're selecting the volumes to be accelerated and here you
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can see we're selecting the policies to be used for the acceleration so essentially these will tell you what
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data to put in the cache what's the hot data so we have some preconfigured
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algorithms as well as you can select custom algorithms so now there we've
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selected the volumes now they're accelerated and we're going to move over
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you can see in the summary all the four volumes that were installed are now
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accelerated with the ocz deneva and the ocz uh to be clear guys the volumes that
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are being accelerated here are going to be mechanical volumes that we're assign
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that uh an SSD volume is then being assigned to to Cache now I can tell you
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guys right now looking at the interface for this assuming it's going to work this way in the final model check this
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out guys 15 uh that
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15, 15 15,000 total iops per second
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which is much better than you can do with any mechanical volume as we're
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about to see when they actually turn the volume acceleration off this is much
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easier than what I've seen in implementations from LSI and adaptech in
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their RAID storage managers and not nearly as restrictive because you can
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take SATA drives you can take PCIe drives you can Clump them together you
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can separate them apart so you could say you got a 1.6 terabyte Revo drive you go
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I want one terabyte for dedicated SSD storage I want 600 gigabytes that's
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going to actually cash a mechanical volume I have somewhere else on the
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server um this is extremely exciting because up until now there's been no
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real caching solution for SSD available on Linux at all in spite of that being
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where most of this most of the server data is
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actually dealt with um now is this just
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going to be Linux or you guys going to have other Solutions as well we're going to have other Solutions as well we
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already have a solution for VMware it's called VXL the Linux solution is called
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lxl as we've discussed and we're going to also have a Windows solution which will be called wxl thanks so much Jerome
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this has been very helpful and don't miss any of our CES 2013 coverage here
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at the show and as always don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips powered by
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