OWC SSD Preliminary Testing

Just got in our large order of the OWC Mercury Extreme Raid Edition SSD's (200gb size). While I am waiting on the R910's they are destined for, I threw a few into an older Dell PowerEdge 6950 with quad Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.6ghz CPU's. I setup a single boot drive and a 4-disk RAID10 group. The RAID settings were set to 1MB stripe size, adaptive read-ahead, and writeback. Went through a normal Windows 2008 R2 Standard installation to run my IOMeter and (soon) SQLIO tests.

The results were pretty good.

Using 4MB IO sizes, they REALLY shined bursting over 2800 MB/s of thruput.

The details of the test were: 4MB IO size, 50% read, 50% write, 50% random and 50% sequential. The sustained average was a more-sane 1100 MB/s with the same settings.

Using 4k IO's, I saw over 600 MB/s, which is about what I expected, and the IOPs were good at >50,000.

Not bad for ~$2400 of storage, with a full 5-year replacement warranty.

Stay tuned for further, more detailed testing including SQLIO. I know you SQL Server guys like to see those. I'm running Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise on these 4 right now as a sandbox testing environment. Using these SSD's with Oracle parallel execution has made a GIANT impact on our application performance so far. Keep in mind, we're not a production shop, and no important data was at risk. This is just a "testing the waters" scenario before we move further.

10GBase-T is here

You read that right, 10-Gigabit Ethernet over CAT5E or CAT6A, with distance limitations of course, and good cabling.

This is the Arista Networks 7120T-4S 10GBase-T switch. I am anxious to get this installed and tested with the new servers coming in multiple Broadcom 57710 NICs. Hyper-V and ESX should run nicely with 4x 10GBase-T in LACP per physical host.

Now for the pics:

OWC SSD in Macbook Pros

I received the two 13" MacBook Pro's and their OWC SSD's yesterday:

Installation was a snap taking a couple of minutes each:

After installing Mac OS X 10.6, I saw just how fast these things are. From the "dong" to logged in was only a matter of seconds, maybe 10 seconds from the power-on button.

I setup Bootcamp with Windows 7 X64 Ultimate because the two end-users requested this. After setting that up and installing the appropriate Bootcamp drivers, I updated them and rebooted.

I tried IOMeter  and saw good results, right at what was advertised. Being my curious self, I bumped the IO Size to 4MB and was surprised to see the performance even higher than advertised at 339MBs:

Now I am looking forward to seeing what 12 of those in RAID10 and RAID0 will do. Can't beat that for the price.