What happens when you string together 24 256GB Samsung MLC SSDs - you get 6TB of storage and 2GB/sec throughput. Sweet mother of ---! Discovered the news on Lucas Mearian's Computer World blog who writes:
When you've got millions of dollars at your disposal, and access to some of the industry's best hardware engineers, what do you do? Well, if you're Samsung you make a YouTube video showing the speed, capacity and reliability you can get by stringing together 24 solid state disk drives behind a RAID controller to create "the world's most powerful consumer computer". The result: 6TB of storage and 2GB/sec throughput that is able to load 53 programs 18 seconds. Whoa.
The video below shows the 24 SSDs setup along with some interesting benchmarks. For instance, in the video they rip a 700MB DVD in 0.8s, open all of Microsoft Office apps in 0.5s, and launch 53 programs in 18.09s! At $500 a pop per SSD, it'll cost you $12,000 for ludicrously fast hard drive speeds! Of course, I remember writing about Samsung's Super Fast SATA hard drive in 2004, which featured 3Gb/s speed using traditional HDD technology, which is cheaper than SSDs. Of course, it's 3Gb/s (3 Gigabits per second) not 3GB/s (3 Gigabytes per second), so you'd have to divide that by 8 bits per byte or 0.375 GB/s or 375MB/s. That's odd - that's faster than the 220MB/s random access speed of each individual SSD (aggregate is 24 x 220MB/s). I thought SSDs were generally faster than hard drives? Something must be off in my math. Actually, just read that the 3GB/s is the speed of the I/O channel. The read speed is 1.5GB/s or 0.156 GB/s, which is 156MB/s . Now that sounds more accurate!
And then of course, there's perpendicular hard drive technology, which is a new way of "squeezing" more bits onto a hard drive by changing the orientation of the way the bits are recorded. Normally magnetic bits are written parallel to the drive's surface, but not with perpendicularity - its 90 degrees perpendicular to the normal parallel orientation. Because the bits are recorded upright and "into" the surface of the drive platter, you can squeeze a lot more bits together without the bits polarity causing the bits to flip their magnetic orientation. Check out my blog post where a classic School House Rock video makes an appearance along with a hilarious Hitachi video on perpendicular HDD technology.
Anyway, here's the 24 SSD RAID video:
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