1-2tb SSD for MacPro?

[houser42]

Thanx LokusofBorg

Any idea if the Stardom will allow max thruput for those vertex drives?

 

[retnuh]

One vertex2 drive is close to maxing out sata 3gb/s, so two drives in a raid 0 should do it no problem. But since you're looking for low latency/fast random reads I doubt it'll be pulling 300MB/s constantly.

Just a wild guess... 300 tracks * 64KB (audio sample size per second) = 19.2MB/s sustained random reads. With a single vertex 2 handling 40-50MB/s 4K random reads, two of those in raid 0 so I'd guess 70-100MB/s random reads.

So.....
300 tracks * 4KBs = 1.2MBs
300 tracks * 32KBs = 9.6MBs
300 tracks * 64KBs = 19.2MBs
300 tracks * 256KBs = 76.8MBs

So I don't think you're throughput bound, just latency bound and with the SSDs being at 0.1ms instead of say 7ms for a HDD. In my example 300 tracks * 4KB with a HDD with 7ms seek it'll take >2 seconds to read the data and at 196 tracks you're over 1 second already. So with the SSDs I think you'll be good.

 

[houser42]

Thanx retnuh
and the stardom will not inhibit this calculation and be the bottleneck in any way as you see it?

 

[retnuh]

it shouldn't, raid 0 and 1 are pretty basic, so there's nothing fancy needed on the stardom controller, and since the random read of both drives isn't going to exceed 300MBs anyways it'll be fine. Sequential reads and writes are going to be capped at 300MBs (a little under for various reasons) because of hitting SATA's max, but thats only going to matter when installing new samples.

I think the stardom is going to be the quickest/easiest/cheapest way to get this up and going. From there you've got options, like putting in a second one, and doing raid 0 to the two drive bays (since you've have 300MBs per cable then), or a dedicated raid controller, etc..


Side note, I'm cloning my system drive in my mbp right now to a owc ssd 240gb, its a sandforce SF1200 based drive, I'll toss up some xbench numbers when its done.

 

[houser42]

You think the difference in price will be worth it in the long run?
Very small differences in performance according to this test..

 

[retnuh]

should be good, you need capacity mostly, and since its not going to be for daily use, ie lots of random writes so it won't matter. get what'll fit your size needs.