SSD’s in RAID 0 or a Pro SSD?

[Jon Schilling]

Eli.

Are the SSD’s made/approved for being “striped”? I’ll guess not likely, (most aren’t).
If you don’t know, don’t do it, you’ll likely cause more harm than good.

Jon Schilling
Sales and Marketing

GB Labs
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[Eli Singer]

What do you mean approved for being “striped”?
People are using them in RAID 0 all the time, question is, will it do better in an editing environment than a single Pro drive?

[Alex James]

Hi Eli,

“Disk striping is the process of dividing a body of data into blocks and spreading the data blocks across multiple storage devices, such as hard disks or solid-state drives (SSDs). A stripe consists of the data divided across the set of hard disks or SSDs, and a striped unit, or strip, that refers to the data slice on an individual drive.” Ref: https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/disk-striping

Basically it means dividing the data over a number of drives (i.e a RAID) So multiple HDD drives can be accessed at once for high speed data transfer).

I’ve been looking for a similar solution to yourself but for a different purpose. Check out my post:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/381/944

I’d Just buy one of these if you can afford:
SANDISK EXTREME 900 PORTABLE SSD
https://www.sandisk.com/home/ssd/extreme-900-ssd
Gives you up 2TB storage which will be fast, secure and highly portable. Very high speed data transfer and doesn’t require external power.

A RAID enclosure may be a better option to with if you require a larger drive and you should be able to do it a little cheaper.

Regards,

Alex

Alex James

TINY ARK
http://www.tinyark.com

[Eli Singer]

I know what striping is ?
I was asking what does the expression “approved for being striped” means…

In any case, the SANDISK EXTREME 900 PORTABLE SSD is actually nothing more than 2 Sandisk Ultra II in Raid 0 stuffed in an enclosure.
Question is, will it do better in an editing environment than 1 Sandisk Extreme or Samsung 850 Pro?

Eli

[Alex Gardiner]

My question to you would be how you handle the RAID side of things?

I don’t know of many (RAID aware) filesystems or hardware RAID implementations that can properly TRIM SSDs… Normally you have to rely on built in garbage collection. Happy to be wrong, but fairly sure I’m right.

NB: ZFS on BSD can issue the command to the underlying devices. Don’t think ZOL can do it (yet).

Things to think about:

* In the real world we found that SSD based ZFS (ZOL) pools don’t really slow down when writing large files. Point in case, we have compact 1U indiestor servers on a fleet of OB trucks. As yet there has been no real need to secure erase.

* I don’t know of (m)any SSD’s that are built with striping in mind. There are however enterprise grade SSDs that are SLC based (not MLC). They usually have caps for retaining data in the case of an unclean power down (makes them suitable for cache devices in certain types of storage pool). These products tend to have a greater endurance rating too.

* FWIW my experience has been that the endurance of even lower end MLC type SSDs (Samsung Pro etc) seems to be remarkable.

To conclude, I’m not sure how much this helps, but ostensibly it seems that no – I don’t there is no such thing as an SSD that it setup for striping, per se.

IMO just get one big/better quality/higher IOPS SSD and back it up.

Thats my view.

Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com

[Eli Singer]

I won’t be using it in ZFS, it will be connected directly to the main editing machine in RAID.
I have a FreeNAS server all the data that I’m just setting up separately.

I am also not concerned with data loss during power failure. All the data is backed up and these drive/s are only meant to work as working drives for hot projects.

Looks like I’ll be going Pro, can’t seem to find any concrete info on the matter…

On a different subject, what are your thoughts regarding another SSD for Scratch Disk?

Eli

[Alex Gardiner]

Then in my opinion Evo, Pro or similar will be fine. You’re unlikely to kill them as a single user. If they slow down secure erase and start over.

Generally the more expensive (pro/enterprise) drives have better IOPS figures, which is less important if you’re just doing sequential reads/writes… maybe more so as a cache drive for lots of little bitty files.

Pretty sure there aren’t RAID specific SSDs (would love to see a link if there are). HDDs yes – TLER and such + designed for density/vibration sensors etc etc… SSDs though I’m not convinced other than the logic that enterprise class drives are probably going to have a better MTFB rating.

Actually I don’t think you can screw this up.

As above, the weakest link will be how you implement the RAID. OS X + Windows have crap offerings OTB, unless you use a hardware based controller from LSI/Areca/Adaptec etc.

Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com