24 Solid State Drives in Raid

posted Mar 9th 2009 1:20pm by Caleb Kraft
filed under: pcs hacks

In a time when marketing is all around us, companies often have to come up with new and creative ways to get us excited. Some go the viral route, others hire famous spokes people. Samsung did well with this idea. Let some computer geeks build something awesome and have fun with it. They chained 24 drives together to create a whopping 6Terrabyte array. They run various speed tests and even test the drive integrity by bouncing on a trampoline while dangling them from their chords. Yeah, they make the computer geeks a little geekier than they need to be, but who didn’t get excited to see those transfer speeds?

Comments [63]

tagged: samsung, solid state, ssd

Reader Comments

I love the soundtrack – Good fun video – and bloody hell. I thought my machine was fast but DAMN! Now how much would a build like that cost.

Posted at 1:35 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Alex Towler

Has anyone told they you don’t need to defrag SSDs?

Posted at 1:44 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Incubus

incubus: i was thinking the same thing :) the seek time is basically zero for ssd’s, so they’re test doesn’t show very much.

Posted at 1:53 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by andrew

“while dangling them from their chords.”

since when are solid state drives so musical?

Posted at 1:56 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by andres

You don’t need to defragment them! In fact, that only hurts the drives…

Besides that, the video was pretty awesome. 2GBps is nothing to laugh at.

Posted at 2:00 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Jonathan Mayer

Ok, im almost rolling under the table of laughter at that marketing stunt and soundtrack.

But really 6TB in ssd, that would be a nice setup to have, but i would put the drives inside the case :-)

Posted at 2:15 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Marcus

Wow, that was pretty damn epic.

Posted at 2:15 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Ryan Staniforth

I love how they didn’t mention the cost of any of the parts. Not even the price of a single SSD.

Posted at 2:16 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Dingus

You know – those ssds were hardly full when doing the “defrag” – try it again when your 6 terabytes of drive has only 6 megs of free space and severe fragmentation.

Crysis at high res? Absolutely has more to do with the ram/cpu/videocards/motherboard than drive access speeds.

About the only part of this that impressed me was A) the 2 GBPS transfer speed and B) the fact that when bouncing on the trampoline none of the drives came unplugged.

Posted at 2:21 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by smilr

I agree with everyone on the defragging… don’t defrag an SSD >.< It’s only going to decrease the life of the drive. For being such “nerds”, they should know defragging doesn’t help anything on an SSD. Also… wtf with crysis? Hard drives don’t make an ass-worth’s difference on the games you can run unless you have an absolutely horrible hard drive. It will decrease loading times, that’s about it. What I really want to see is how quick it can make Half-Life 2 loading times =P.

Posted at 2:41 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Pilotgeek

imagine somthing like than in an eeepc….somehow imagine lol

Posted at 2:51 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by cameron20020

yeah how about showing the write speed, not read speed, we know reading is really fast

Posted at 2:53 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by huguin

As said above, showing in-game footage of Crysis is nothing special. Show us how long it took to load the level.

Posted at 3:11 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by cynic

hahaha, 2gbyte/s…
as they’ve described it, saying it’s 6tb of storage, they’d only have a huge jbod which will never give 2gbyte/s… more like 2gbit/s.
12*raid 1+0 would possibly make the mainboard hit its bandwith limit.
so how stupid can one be, send 24 pricey ssds to someone who tries to defragment them to prove the speed!?
or, even better, delete a single 5gig file in ntfs… wow, what a showoff.

Posted at 3:15 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by H3PO

“Defraggin’ my hard drive for thrills.”
- Weird Al Yankovic

Posted at 4:20 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by punmaster

Did Weebl make the soundtrack or something?

Posted at 4:24 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by WeblionX

I hope we are not talking 2 gbit/s because I spent far far less on 750 gig SATAs with a 9650SE-ML16 3ware card and get 480MB/s writes. Yes, almost 2x the speed for my guess, over 10x less.

Posted at 4:35 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Nathan Stratton

Song was cool, that’s about it.

All that and they still can’t catch typos on there site…

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/5963/samsungtypo.jpg

Posted at 4:48 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Nate

Oh, and I forgot to add, looking up the prices on 256gb SSD’s. About $500, you do the math. 24 drives. Over $12000 in SSD’s….

Posted at 5:01 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Nate

is this the *second* time I’ve seen the word “cord” misspelled as “chord” here on hackaday? This is not a musical chord and it is not a section taken from a circle, it is an electrically cord and should be spelled as such. How can a hacker writer misspell such a common word?
-Taylor

Posted at 5:20 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Taylor Alexander

That DeFrag thing was bogus though; They used Auslogics Disk Defrag and if you look at the numbers, even though it went through over 10,000 files only 3 of them were actually fragmented… My computer does the same thing, and I have only a 500GB 7200HDD. the rest was just CPU if you ask me, you don’t need good transfer rates to open start menu programs and to run crysis I’m not sure why the hell they think 2GB a second would help there lol. 2GB transfer rates are really awesome, but the way they showed it was plain stupid.

Posted at 5:40 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Anon-e-mouse

“electrically cord”

ROFL, taylor

Oh the irony.

“How can a hacker writer misspell such a common word?”

You tell me…. you tell me….

It’s not like these comments are professional writings or anything. Ease off man. If you’re going to be a grammar Nazi then at least have the decency to use correct grammar

Posted at 6:06 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by mytharak

@nathan… what drives are you using that can get those kinds of r/w cycles?

Posted at 6:18 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Josh

Well I know what I am going to invest my tax refund in…

Posted at 6:24 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by bash

I hope you guys got paid for posting it.

Posted at 6:42 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by chris

Not for nothing, but doesn’t delete on NTFS just erase the record int the Master File Table — not actually traverse the bits and clear them? So you could delete a 5TB file in roughly the same speed as a 5b file — no?

Posted at 6:55 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Jim

it was so boring i almost killed myself
i trust you will cover my psychiatric expenses

-hero

Posted at 7:29 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by -hero

what they need to do is have the bare minimum ram for vista and try to use a paging file only

Posted at 8:17 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by takato

@takato – good idea

not sure about the chords. does that sound like minor 7th to you?

Posted at 8:52 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by yoss

really.. the soundtrack sounds a lot like weebl.. or even firth..

either way i want one!!

Posted at 9:07 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by SteveDiRaddo

The only way they pulled this off was of the Full custom ram and the serious processing power this thing had, it was a super computer for god sakes!! all super computers are capable of feats like this, and most of them cost way below half the price. Now if they did this with a regular computer with an average cpu, lets say an athalonx2 with 2 gigs of ram, and the system not overclocked to insane levels. Im confident a average hard drive would beat all of those solid state drives installed in a similar machine.

Posted at 11:03 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by nick

look like they dont know what they doing

Posted at 12:04 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by therian

I think the point of this was to prove the concept that SSDs can meet and even beat traditional hard drives in the performance arena. Of course, just because you *can* doesn’t mean it’s practical.

Posted at 12:20 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by random_dude

very cool! I want for myself. :)

p.s. typo: 6 terabytes, not terrabytes.

Posted at 12:35 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by entropia

Bit like having a mac really

Posted at 1:47 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by james

I don’t get the DVD ripping either : copying a DVD iso is probably pretty fast, but ripping it will reach the DVD drive limit.

Defrag and crysis were nonsense as well. This is marketing with a different smell.

Posted at 2:14 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by Iv

I see nobody has mentioned the “copying DVD file” test.

It was a 700mb rip, not even a 4.7GB rip. (If I had 6TB of storage you can bet I am not going to subject my video to poor compression.)

Posted at 3:00 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by nubie

AAAAAAAAAUGH WHY NOT CORE I7 EXTREMES@!!!!??

Posted at 4:25 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by hum4n

W0W and I thought that I wasted time…
As a true geek you ARE a hacker with ETHICS…
Use a large “marketing” program to do the same thing…
At someone elses cost they’ll never know..
They do have “super computers” and they CAN be hacked…

Posted at 5:18 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by hacktisbeotch

OH yea be sure to use the right CHORDS…

Posted at 5:21 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by hacktisbeotch

funny idea did it w/seagates when 1gb hard drives did’nt exist…
like them it looks nice lots of storage but no real use except stor lots of music!! lol

Posted at 5:27 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by free4all

lulz @ you guys

of course its all bs, it was a marketing team

good to see that you can all get trolled by a youtube video

Posted at 7:15 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by aficionado

Run Crysis.

Posted at 8:14 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by Gert

fwiw, it seems like you’re missing the entire point of the video if you’re dwelling on the fact you don’t need to defrag SSDs. the video was just a bunch of random tests to show their speed (some are more valid than others). defrag on normal HDs is slow, here quite the contrary.

Posted at 10:14 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by nick

Am I the only one wondering why they needed two 1000 watt power supplies to power that? And the only one not impressed at the delete speed? I can delete files almost as fast.

Posted at 10:25 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by BAF

@nick
in that case, why not advertise the fact that you don’t even need to defrag in the first place? an ssd has almost no seek time, therefore defragging is entirely pointless. They tried making points in the video, but the points proved nothing except that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Posted at 10:27 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by Pilotgeek

yes i am quite surprised as well about how they didn’t brag about how ssds don’t need defragging

Posted at 10:46 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by joshcabico

is it me, or did i see left for dead on there… shame he didnt show how that runs

Posted at 12:05 pm on Mar 10th, 2009 by marko van chmiel

The 2 GB/ s is impressive, but a couple of the tests were bogus. Crysis was the one that threw me off, they should’ve just showed the loading time for it.

Still, pretty sweet.

Posted at 5:00 pm on Mar 10th, 2009 by Drew Harwell

God what a miserable bunch. I think most of the people who have made comments here need a fucking sense of humour.

Fuck Me

Posted at 5:34 pm on Mar 10th, 2009 by Thsyrus

Everyone that keeps writing that defragging the SSD is pointless obviously knows nothing about the SD instruction set. It WILL make a difference. Synchronous read is in the SSD instruction set and therefore with an increased stripe size, reduced addressing instructions are used to provide a synchronous read and transfer speed is further increased. This is a fundamental instruction on any serial access memory.
Sorry to be a kill joy here, but you are wrong..
Paul.

Posted at 3:52 am on Mar 11th, 2009 by Herbo

GO PAUL!!

Posted at 1:49 pm on Mar 11th, 2009 by Jason

“I hope we are not talking 2 gbit/s because I spent far far less on 750 gig SATAs with a 9650SE-ML16 3ware card and get 480MB/s writes. Yes, almost 2x the speed for my guess, over 10x less.”

Nathan – he clearly states “Two Thousand Megabytes per second”.

Posted at 4:28 pm on Mar 12th, 2009 by Xb0xGuru

This is a good example of how far we need to go in order to get close to ram speeds with ssds. Now they just need to combine those 24 drives into one (raid wise) and make a port able to handle up to lets say 100 gbits/sec (~12.5 gigabytes/sec). Less mess, one drive, one cable, same or better performance. Eventually these things will match ram speeds or may even surpass them eliminating the need for ram. If that were the case, any OS would virtually be pre-loaded. Instant bootup times. Weeeeeeee!

Expensive setup, but impressive none the less.

Posted at 10:21 am on Mar 14th, 2009 by Djedi

100 Gbit? Good luck. The parts are out there, but if you can afford them, you can probably afford 24 SSDs to play with, too.

What I took from this was a lesson in reliability: Assuming they had them in RAID 0 rather than JBOD, take whatever your reliability figure for one SSD over its life is, raise it to the 24th power, and it starts to look pretty shaky. It is a great flash in the pan, but not much real content there.

Show me four of them in RAID 0, tucked into a 5.25″ slot, running off the motherboard SATA controller rather than a bucks-up RAID card. That would be more relevant to my interests.

Posted at 5:36 pm on Mar 15th, 2009 by Jim

I really don’t see why they showed Crysis at high res… They should have, like everyone else said, just showed the loading times.

Posted at 4:15 pm on Mar 28th, 2009 by Chris

I just wish they showed how long it took to boot Vista.

Posted at 9:18 pm on Mar 30th, 2009 by mr00000

so for 12 000 bucks vista might run good?

Posted at 4:12 pm on Apr 7th, 2009 by carsloth

God what a miserable bunch. I think most of the people who have made comments here need a fucking sense of humour.

NO FUCKING SWEARING GOD DAMN IT!

Posted at 7:53 pm on Apr 7th, 2009 by carsloth

LoL,

1st: I’ve never seen a Professional HDD-Benchmark with Windows and NTFS!

2nd: I agree with defrag and Crysis

Nice commercial SAMSUNG. But a huge fake …

Posted at 1:17 am on Apr 28th, 2009 by tbe

Okay, a couple of things here, very impressive but first, why on earth defrag an SSD? Not only does it decrease the life of the disk but also SSDs don’t get fragmented since they don’t have disk plates, and being as each drive is doing the exact same thing to each drive as a single drive would be I don’t see how defrageg 24 SSDs in a raid would be faster than defragging 1 SSD. Also for Crysis, graphics would have very little affect from the hard drive, only thing that the hard drives would realy affect is the load time.

If I did this project though I totaly would have got like an external RAID that could hold 24 drives :P And idk if I’d waste the money to get 6TB lol, I’d imagine the smaller ones would be just as fast when it comes to solid state memory and the cheapest 250GB SSD I’ve found was like $700 so for 6TB from 24x 250GB SSDs would cost almost $17,000 lol

Posted at 8:45 am on May 14th, 2009 by kc3

Everyone is complaining about the defrag. Who cares? I like how is opened all those windows in such a fast time, and yea you can get that same speed with one ssd but i think the point of the huge
raid setup was show you how raid is a great idea if you want space and speed. i can tell you one thins i would like to get all those ssd’s then resell them so i can buy my self a Gamer pc that fucking rocks!!!

Posted at 9:59 am on Jul 22nd, 2009 by ChrisB

Weebl MUST HAVE done the sound track!

Posted at 9:20 am on Sep 9th, 2009 by whyme

24 Solid State Drives in Raid

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