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.

Oracle Bigfile Tablespaces

After many years of ignoring Bigfile Tablespaces, I finally devoted some time to investigating them. I've been missing out. I've always hated building a "shell" database instance, then running my script to build my normal small file tablespaces, and add 10+ 8GB datafiles to each of my six main tablespaces. This is a LONG running script because the disk IO is not very fast in my existing SAN storage. This will not be an issue anymore in the near future, thanks to the folks at OWC. Still, managing 20-40 datafiles per tablespace is just plain aggravating. Now, I have one datafile per tablespace, that grows by 1GB in size as needed up to the filesystem limitation I am using, which is 32TB. I do not plan on outgrowing that anytime in the near future. Sure, it makes Rman recovery slower when recovering a single 300+gb datafile, but again, not on SSD. I don't use rman to begin with. Datapump thru bash shell scripts with Crontab is my backup of choice for my Linux/Oracle servers. Bigfile tablespaces will be going in during my upcoming server/storage refresh for my main tablespaces.

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD's

The verdict is in. We're going with the OWC RE Pro SSD's in our Hyper-V and Oracle DB servers. Why, you ask? Well, the Raid Edition comes with a full 5-year warranty and 28% over-provisioning. My testing of 3x Corsair F240's convinced me the Sandforce-based SSD's are Enterprise-class, and they have the performance I want. Corsair doesn't have the 5-year warranty of the OWC product. OWC put it in writing that if I happen to "write-out" the drives before the warranty is up, they will replace them under warranty. That's standing by your product. I only plan to use them for 3 years because that's our leasing cycle. They'll be replaced in 3 years, so I'm not worrying about the write-cycle lifetime in RAID10. We're also putting them in all developer workstations and notebooks from here on out.

Direct I/O vs. Cached I/O

The simple difference between Direct I/O and Cached I/O:

Direct I/O :

Cached I/O :

Keep in mind, all of your data won't be cached all of the time. Only a small amount will be, so you won't get that high performance 100% of the time. If you want that, go with SSD.

Corsair F240 SSD

I received them yesterday. I installed one in my Mac Pro and copied my Win7 VM to it.

Just finished running ATTO and this was the result:

To make formatting easier, here are the SQLIO results as a linked image:

MB/S
IOPS

Remember, this is a SINGLE drive in my Mac Pro, running a Windows 7 Ultimate X64 VMWare Fusion VM on it. The VM has 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores allocated to it. These tests were ran from within that VM. I know it wasn't "optimal" conditions, but the results look promising given the scenario. Not bad for a single $600 drive.



This is 3 of the F240's in RAID0:

 Now that makes a bit more sense. Not bad at all.

Of course with NAND, TRIM doesn't work with RAID, so the life of the drive may be shortened somewhat until support for TRIM with RAID surfaces.