Intel came on PCI-e SSD market with their Intel SSD 910 card. With a slogan “The ultimate data center SSD” I assume Intel targets rather a server grade hardware, not consumer level.
I’ve got one of this card into our lab. I should say it is very price competitive, comparing with other enterprise level PCIe vendors. For a 400GB card I paid $2100, which gives $5.25/GB. Of course I’ve got some performance numbers I’d like to share.

But before that, few words on the card internals. Intel puts separate 200GB modules, so 400GB card is visible as 2 x 200GB devices in operation system, and 800GB card is visible as 4 different devices. After that you can do software raid0, raid1 or raid10, whatever you prefer.

For my tests I used single 200GB device and pair combined in software raid0 (Duo).

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Every time I have a conversation on SSD, someone mentions btrfs filesystem. And usually it is colored as a solution that will solve all our problems, improve overall performance and SSD in particular, and it is a saviour. Of course it caught my curiosity and I decided to perform a benchmark similar to what I did on ext4 filesystem over Intel 520 SSD.
I was prepared for surprises, as even on formatting stage, mkfs.btrfs says that filesystem is EXPERIMENTAL. In case with filesystems I kind of agree with Stewart, so question #1, what you should ask deciding on what filesystem to use, is “Was this filesystem used in a production more than 5 years?”, so from this point, btrfs has a long way ahead.

How you can get btrfs? …

I was lucky enough to get my hands on new Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo card. So I decided to run the same series of tests I did for other Flash devices. This is ioDrive2 Duo 2.4TB card and it is visible to OS as two devices (1.2TB each), which can be connected together via software RAID. So I tested in two modes: single drive, and software RAID-0 over two drives.

I should note that to run this card you need to have an external power, by the same reason I mentioned in the previous post: PCIe slot can provide only 25W power, which is not enough for ioDrive2 Duo to provide full performance. I mention this, as it may be challenge for some servers: some models may not have connector for external power, and for some …

In my previous post with results for Fusion-io ioDrive we saw some instability in results, I was pointed that it may be fixed in new drivers VSL 3.1.1. I am not sure if this driver is available for everyone – if you are interested, please contact your Fusion-io support representative. I installed new drivers and firmware, and in fact, the result improved.

Information about driver and firmware: Firmware v6.0.0, rev 107006. Fusion-io driver version: 3.1.1 build 172.

Actually an upgrade was not flawless, after a firmware upgrade I had to perform low-level formatting, which erase all data. So if you want to do the same – make sure you copy your data.

So there are results for driver 3.1 (with comparison to previous driver 2.3)

Random writes:
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I still continue to run benchmarks of different SSD cards. This time I show numbers for Virident FlashMAX 1400. This is a MLC PCIe SSD device. There are couple notes on these results.
First, this time I use a different server. For this benchmark it is Cisco UCS C250, while for previous results I used HP ProLiant DL380 G6.

Second note is, that I use a mode “turbo=1″ for Virident card. What does that mean? Apparently PCIe specification has a limitation on available power. If I am not mistaken it is 25W, however Virident to provide full write performance requires 28W. And while many servers can handle 28W on PCIe, this is a non-standard mode, and Virident by default uses 25W (turbo=0). To force full power, I load a driver with turbo=1. I also use “maxperformance” formatting for Virident, …

Following my series of posts on testing different SSD, in my last post I mentioned that SATA SSD performance is getting closer to PCIe cards. It really makes sense to test it under MySQL workload, but before getting to that, let me review the same workload on Fusion-io ioDrive PCIe card. This is yet previous generation of Fusion-io cards, but this is the one that has biggest installation base.

Driver information: Fusion-io driver version: 2.3.10 build 110; Firmware v5.0.7, rev 107053

Following the format of previous benchmarks, first is random write async 16KB case.

We can see some wave-like pattern with throughput 350-400 MiB/sec.

Random reads, async:

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Following my previous benchmarks of SATA SSD cards I got Intel SSD 520 240GB into my hands. In this post I show the results of raw IO performance of this card.

The benchmark methodology I described in previous posts, so let me jump directly to results.

First case is random write asynchronous 8 threads IO, the test is done just after a secure erase operation on the card.

The card is doing stable 380 …

Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.

For tests I use sysbench fileio, 16KiB block size (to match workload from InnoDB, as this is primary usage for me), and recently I switched to use async IO mode. There are two reasons for that. First, MySQL/InnoDB uses async writes, so this will emulate database load, and second, async mode allows to see maximal possible throughput, it does not show reliable latency though, as it appears there is no a reliable way in the Linux asynchronous IO library to get time metrics for particular IO …

I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, that’s why I am looking for comparable alternatives. Samsung 830 256GB looked like a good product, that’s why I decided to test it.

For tests I use sysbench fileio, 16KiB block size (to match workload from InnoDB, as this is primary usage for me), and recently I switched to use async IO mode. There are two reasons for that. First, MySQL/InnoDB uses async writes, so this will emulate database load, and second, async mode allows to see maximal possible throughput, it does not show …

I’m excited by all of the recent developments surrounding the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo! Our own Baron Schwartz will moderate the Diamond Keynote Panel entitled “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL” which will feature a panel of MySQL industry leaders, including: Sundar Raghavan, director product management at Amazon; Paul Mikesell, CEO of Clustrix; a representative from HP; and, a representative from McAfee. The Diamond Sponsor Keynote Panel will take place at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 12th and provide insight into the future of MySQL technology, adoption, and the ecosystem landscape. I am also very pleased to introduce two new sponsors including McAfee which recently joined as a Diamond Sponsor and AOL which …