Conclusion
Most people probably don’t want to install more than a few hard drives into their PC, as it requires a massive case with sufficient ventilation as well as a solid power supply. We don’t consider this project to be something enthusiasts should necessarily reproduce. Instead, we set out to analyze what level of storage performance you’d get if you were to spend the same money as on an enthusiast processor, such as a $1,000 Core i7-975 Extreme. For the same cost, you could assemble 12 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drives. Of course, you still need a suitable multi-port controller, which is why we selected Areca’s ARC-1680iX-20.
These are our findings: The 12 hard drives…
- still cannot reach the I/O performance and access time of a single Intel X25-E flash SSD (thousands of I/O operations per second)
- require careful system configuration (staggered spin-up)
- require a powerful RAID controller with sufficient ports
- aren’t convenient for desktop users
- are still subject to issues when using 2+ TB partitions
- deliver 6 to 8 times more throughput than an individual drive: almost 1,000 MB/s
- deliver 3 to 7 times better I/O performance than an individual drive
- result in 11 TB net capacity in RAID 5 or 10 TB in RAID 6
- deliver excellent cost per gigabyte, especially with the 1 TB Samsung drives we used (2 TB drives are still too expensive)
- still beat a flash SSD array in terms of throughput even if you keep two or three hard disks as spares
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Comments
somehow i wouldnt trust 12 samsung hdd's in a raid array...
pointless seeing as the controller alone costs $1,199.99
Can't trust a huge array without the expensive controller though.
this is nothing else than tehnological perversion
12 GB!?! That's awesome! That's more than my 8GB memory!
12GB! FTW!
12GB of important data + raid0 + hard drive failure =
thats about what a monster gaming computer costs but then again most gamers (well at least me) dont have a lot of money to spend around 2500 for hard drives and controller. imagine the monster fps rates youd get im truly jealous of whatever computer that would go into.
thats about what a monster gaming computer costs but then again most gamers (well at least me) dont have a lot of money to spend around 2500 for hard drives and controller. imagine the monster fps rates youd get im truly jealous of whatever computer that would go into.
why would the fps go up with that array?
Yeah, but can it run Crysis?
But seriously, this is just an interesting look at what you can do if you have gobs of money laying around. While 99% of us don't, it's still cool to see what it does. Consider it them doing something ridiculous for you so you don't even have the temptation of being the only person to have done it.
Can't trust a huge array without the expensive controller though.
Incorrect
What you should have said is "Can't trust a huge array without redundancy (depending on if up-time is importance) and sufficient backups (depending on importance of data).
Holy crap, failure is a sure thing with 12 cheap-o Samsung Spinpoints in a RAID-0.
BTW from my last server array (minimal use - storage mostly) using 3x1tb WD GP's (16mb cache versions) in RAID5 (freenas software) - looking at my S.M.A.R.T status of all the drives showed me that 2 of the 3 hdd's developed bad sectors (or re-allocated sectors) - any could have been fatal etc - all this from minimal load and what not!
With a array like that i wouldnt even go with raid5 with those HDD's - too much data all on one array to risk - id prefer smaller arrays (from experience)
Now another interesting test would be to take the same drives, skip the expensive controller and use OpenSolaris and ZFS with its RAIDZ2 configuration (equals RAID 6) and see what performance you could get using "normal" SATA-ports.
Holy crap, failure is a sure thing with 12 cheap-o Samsung Spinpoints in a RAID-0.
We call them sam-dungs at my work
Atleast they didnt use 12 seagate hdd's with "SD15" or slightly older firmware - we call them sea-fate's
The title was a little misleading. It's not like I have a $1k+ controller card in my back pocket, and I'm sure most other people don't either.
It would be sweet for a media server though, then I wouldn't have 4 drives in my PC. And it could heat my room in the winter.
somehow i wouldnt trust 12 samsung hdd's in a raid array...
I wouldn't be too worried really. So long it isn't seagate drives, it'll probably keep working.
I've got an array with 16x250gb samsungs, and another with 12x250gb samsungs here at work (regular desktop sata drives), and so far only one drive's failed - and as you can tell by the size, they're not new.
In contrast, I've had 7 1TB seagate hotswap server drives fail between january 19th this year and wednesday this week.
thats about what a monster gaming computer costs but then again most gamers (well at least me) dont have a lot of money to spend around 2500 for hard drives and controller. imagine the monster fps rates youd get im truly jealous of whatever computer that would go into.
Not sure what you're trying to say, but despite not improving fps, faster drives still make a huge impact. Sure it's irrelevant if the game stutters, but waiting for the load screen to go away in wow or any other game is almost just as frustrating. I'm using a raid 0 with two 500gb wd's as system, and I still find it rather slow. In fact the 5x500gb I used as storage earlier felt slow as well. Harddrives just never are fast enough, no matter the speed.
I wouldn't be too worried really. So long it isn't seagate drives, it'll probably keep working.I've got an array with 16x250gb samsungs, and another with 12x250gb samsungs here at work (regular desktop sata drives), and so far only one drive's failed - and as you can tell by the size, they're not new.In contrast, I've had 7 1TB seagate hotswap server drives fail between january 19th this year and wednesday this week.
Hence the name "sea-fate"
I know it seems the RAID5 array with 12 disks is reliable, but it's less reliable than a single disk. I'll explain: Say this array has been running for about 4 years as storage = minimal use, no intensive or long read/write operations. You're happy that no drive has failed yet and you're confident at the array's reliability since is RAID5. What you don't know is that if a drive fails and you attempt a rebuild there is a huge chance that another will fail since a rebuild of a 1TB drive is a lengthy IO operation and these drives are getting old. 12 drives is probably past the point where an array is less reliable than a single stand-alone drive.