Intel ICH9R with Mtron PRO SSD

[eternalfantasy]

Hello all
I have been following Solid State Drive developments closely, and found Anandtech's coverage of Mtron SSDs fasinating.

As many of you may be aware, Anand's was the first to discover the bottleneck of the current generation Intel RAID controller, namely the ICH8R/ICH9R, that with a high throughput SSD, such as the Mtron series, the read speed is limited to around 80MB/s;
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3064&p=4

I was running 2x150GB Raptors in RAID0, on an adaptec 3405 RAID controller. After finding an online retailer selling for £150 less then the next closest competitor, I decided to purchase 2x2.5" 32GB Mtron 7000 PRO (120MB/s read - 90MB/s Write).

Running those Mtrons in RAID0 on my Adaptec RAID controller turned out to be dissapointing. Fiddling with the stripe size, I could only maximise the read speed to around 138MB/s, with 0.3ms access time. (Each SSD non-RAIDed returned with a result of 112MB/s - .3ms)

Playing around with different SSD setup, I thought I'd try the onboard RAID on my Asus Maximus Extreme motherboard, the ICH9R. Expecting similer results to the rest of the internet and having the SSD's performance capped at 80MB/s, I was suprised that not only has the access time gone down to 1ms, the read performance was an uncompermising 113MB/s. I promptly RAID0 the drives, and with the following stripe sizes, the results were very promising:

HD Tach
Stripe Size (kb) - Average Read (mb/s) - Burst (mb/s)

4: ------------------------- 196 ------------------ 220
8: ------------------------- 196 ------------------ 220
16: ------------------------ 197 ------------------ 220
32: ------------------------ 196 ------------------ 220
64: ------------------------ 144 ------------------ 137
128: ----------------------- 125 ------------------ 119


This is a SS of the 4kb stripe size:
http://i225.photobucket.com/al...ach_Mtron_RAID0_4K.jpg

I don't know if it was the fact that I had a newer revision of the ICH9R chipset or if there were firmware/driver updates since Anand/Tom's etc ran their tests, but from my results it is clear that there are no longer bottlenecks associated with the Intel ICH9R chipset with high performance Solid State Drives.

System Setup:
Asus Maximus Extreme
Intel QX9650
ATi HD3870XT CrossFire
2x1GB CellShock DDR3-1800

Any possibility for this post to reach Anandtech's reviewers for them to have a look into the situation, and possibly update their results if their tests mirrors mine?

Thanks for reading, and have a good day Anandtech's forumers

 

[n7]

:Q

Very nice.

Welcome to the forums

 

[lopri]

Incredible. Thanks for sharing and welcome to the forum as well.

What was the file system you used? Assuming NTFS, was the 4kb stripe size trouble-free? 4kb is also the default cluster size of NTFS and I don't think such a small stripe size is recommended for regular HDDs. Maybe not so for SSDs?

That said, what you've find regarding performance/stripe sizes is extremely interesting. Maybe AnandTech used the default stripe size (128kb) of ICH8R/9R, and that's why they experienced the bottleneck? How does a single SSD perform with 64kb/128kb stripe size? (I know I'm asking too much so please don't feel obligated. In case you plan to toy with those puppies some more..)

 

[lopri]

Well, there is no stripe size in single disk, I was out of my mind. Just ignore my stupid question.

Edit: In the AT review, it's not clear whether they built RAID0 arrays for their test. As a matter of fact it looks like they enabled AHCI and installed Matrix Storage drivers then tested single drives (No RAID). But I will try to forward your finding to the editors' attention.

Edit 2: BTW, how much are those 32GB SDDs going for these days? If you don't mind.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: lopri
BTW, how much are those 32GB SDDs going for these days? If you don't mind.

Only $1100 each. That's the 3.5 inch version, but it's the same price as the 2.5".

 

[lopri]

Lovely..

 

[eternalfantasy]

I got those SSDs for £514 each from komplett.co.uk, but after a week of ordering they rised the price to £679! luckly I wasn't affected by the price change

I had my OS, Windows XP installed on a separate HDD, and just tested each stripe size of the 2 SSDs, with just the chipset driver installed, which is pretty pain free.
Yes I was using NTFS, and I have no idea what those small stripe sizes does to normal HDDs...
In the AT review they found that the single drive on a ICH9R Chipset was limited to just below 80MB/s, which I found not to be the case on my tests, which ran at 113MB/s. Indeed operating on a single drive the ICH9R don't need to split the data into stripes. From my table of the data, at least from synthetic benchmarks there are not much difference to performance with stripe sizes 4, 8, 16 and 32KB on the ICH9R.

 

[Gary Key]

Hi,

The last release of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager in conjunction with the latest chipset inf files have removed the bottleneck. We are busy retesting all of the SSD drives (our mini-roundup went out the window because of this) at this point and will have an update shortly.

 

[n7]

Excellent! :thumbsup:

Now can you look into your crystal ball & tell me when these lovely SSDs will be a buck a gig?

 

[DSF]

Thanks for sharing, but like everyone else said, it'll be a while before it's information I can use.