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Just ordered 10 MTRON PRO 3.5" 64GB SATA SSD

J

JohnVM

Member
Hey Guys,

So, as some of you may have noticed on our other threads on this board, we're building a pretty crazy system and have ordered 10 MTRON PRO 3.5" 64GB SATA SSD's which we're going to be running in a RAID0 with an Areca 1680ix card. You can see our system build process at http://battleshipjusty.blogspot.com

Anyways, we want an external enclosure for our 10 MTRON drives. Just like our other posts, cost doesn't matter, performance does. What's the best external enclosure we could get for the 10 MTRON drives?

Thanks.
John
 
I've used the 5-drive version of this chassis for a few days from AIC/Xtore and liked it pretty well:

XJ-SA12-010 Xtore 10 drive SAS

It uses the SFF-8088 connector, of which your Areca controller only has 1. Not sure if you're planning to route the internal SFF-8087 outside the chassis, but that would also work if you get a different cable.

I do not know if all 10 drives would be accessible from a single SAS connection, or if you need the 2 cables run. In the 5 drive model, 3 disks were run on their own channel and the last 2 were joined on the same channel. Not sure what the 10 drive one does.

It uses a Vitesse chip for the SAS backplane, I believe. Not sure how that compares performance-wise to the some of the others I've seen - LSI and PMC-Sierra. So you may take that into consideration.
 
Should be Raid 10, or Raid 5. No reason to have that many drives in Raid 0.

Also you are overloading your phase by putting too many W of TDP into it.

It should also not be on its side.

Just a quick question, do you sell drugs, or did you win the lottery? You seem to want to spend as much money as you can with very little sense.

Commercial SSD are significantly faster than MTRON. I have seen a $10k (less than 10 MTRON) commercial SSD SAN that does 1 gig/sec read/write on 320 gb.

If you are looking at spending money on things you don't understand, go for http://www.superssd.com/. You are going to have significantly faster I/O.
 
Originally posted by: EarthwormJim
Why are you doing a raid 0? You have a really good controller card, why not a Raid 5?
Click to expand...

Why are they buying 10 MTRON PRO 3.5" 64GB SATA SSD's ????????
 
Originally posted by: Tweakin
Originally posted by: EarthwormJim
Why are you doing a raid 0? You have a really good controller card, why not a Raid 5?
Click to expand...

Why are they buying 10 MTRON PRO 3.5" 64GB SATA SSD's ????????
Click to expand...

For real since the OP says money = no object they should be looking at something like this.
 
Originally posted by: Rubycon
Originally posted by: Tweakin
Originally posted by: EarthwormJim
Why are you doing a raid 0? You have a really good controller card, why not a Raid 5?
Click to expand...

Why are they buying 10 MTRON PRO 3.5" 64GB SATA SSD's ????????
Click to expand...

For real since the OP says money = no object they should be looking at something like this.
Click to expand...

holy crap that hella expensive.

If anyone has this at a non enterprise level, i would seriously be jealous.
 
Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: Rubycon
Originally posted by: Tweakin
Originally posted by: EarthwormJim
Why are you doing a raid 0? You have a really good controller card, why not a Raid 5?
Click to expand...

Why are they buying 10 MTRON PRO 3.5" 64GB SATA SSD's ????????
Click to expand...

For real since the OP says money = no object they should be looking at something like this.
Click to expand...

holy crap that hella expensive.

If anyone has this at a non enterprise level, i would seriously be jealous.
Click to expand...

Eve online runs 2 of them for their database. :shocked:
 
ok don't be rediculous... he might have lots of money but there is a difference between spending 5k on drives... and 200k.

but why those mtrons? the new OCZ SSDs get 120MB/s read and 100MB/s write... thats more then 50% faster then a raptor, and I think 3x faster then the mtrons...

Also, the whole POINT of expensive RAID controllers is to be able to do RAID5 well... you could have done RAID0 with a motherboard... and why are you putting them in an external enclosure? they are only 2.5 inches long and 1/4th inch thick each, they produce no detectable level of heat, no vibration, no noise, and consume less then 1 watt of power each... it is IDEAL To pack 10 of them like sardines inside the case itself. (honestly, I Would go with 5 x the new OCZ SSD, 1000$ each)
 
Originally posted by: taltamir
ok don't be rediculous... he might have lots of money but there is a difference between spending 5k on drives... and 200k.

but why those mtrons? the new OCZ SSDs get 120MB/s read and 100MB/s write... thats more then 50% faster then a raptor, and I think 3x faster then the mtrons...

Also, the whole POINT of expensive RAID controllers is to be able to do RAID5 well... you could have done RAID0 with a motherboard... and why are you putting them in an external enclosure? they are only 2.5 inches long and 1/4th inch thick each, they produce no detectable level of heat, no vibration, no noise, and consume less then 1 watt of power each... it is IDEAL To pack 10 of them like sardines inside the case itself. (honestly, I Would go with 5 x the new OCZ SSD, 1000$ each)
Click to expand...

RAID5 should only be used when it's NECESSARY - to prevent interruption of service/availability due to a drive failure. The reliability of SSD's in long term use is still unknown. They can still fail! That said, if you want speed, forget RAID5 or 6. Even with the fastest cards you will still incur a fairly steep penalty. It's alleviated if the writes are kept within the cache size and write back policies are enforced. (better use a BBU) However in really long periods of writing the streams are not continuous going through periods where the cache gets flushed and the disks have to play catch up. This "pumping" is reduced by increasing random i/o capability of the individual disk members in which SSD tech should prevail. Another thing for single disk users to remember keeping important stuff on these things is there is no physical platter to recover important data from if there is a failure! Recovery from a SSD is going to be fun if you need it. ALWAYS have a backup policy if your data is valuable.
 
Yeah actually, as the intention of this setup is to be as fast as possible the solution that we're using is running the MTRON's in RAID 0 and then simply doing a raw disk copy of the raid array (basically a ghost) onto 1TB SATA drives which are running RAID1 every 24 hours or so. That gives results in preservation of data by redundancy, as well as not costing the overhead/performance degradation of a RAID5 setup. The past 24 hours of data is easily replaced, so its not a big deal if the RAID fails.

On a side note, we have put 5 of the mtrons in and with only 5 of the 10 in, we scored the 4th highest score on PCMark Vantage ever, a 13,584 -- you can read up on it at http://battleshipjusty.blogspot.com

The remaining 5 are going in this week when the enclosure arrives. Should be pretty crazy. (We're finance guys, but still like getting high scores)

Thanks for all the help so far.
 
you know, it might be more economical in terms of speed to get more mtrons for the raid0 rather then the fastest SATA SSD on the market. As said before, the REALLY fastest ones are 200k special monsters, not the stuff you buy at newegg. But cost wise it makes no sense...

Getting this sort of speed with a relatively inexpensive solution is very impressive. Ha, and people were getting on his case for "wasting money on stuff he doesn't know".
I am starting to feel that this was well researched.

Also, I looked up the pro and it is actually nearly identical in speed to the OCZ drives I mentioned. I was confusing it with some cheaper older mtron SSD drives.

BTW, did you lap your CPU and cooler?
 
I always thought 1680ix was for SAS.

Also it is a huge card.

I still go back to my original that these guys either a.) sell drugs, b.) won the lottery. If there was a purpose to this computer I would change my opinion, but thus far it has just been spend as much money as possible with very little thought.
 
Yes they are almost as long as a 3870x2 - Text

Pictured there is the ARC 1261ML which has the same pcb as the new (yet released) ARC-1680ix-16. The IOP needs breathing room as well or lots of airflow around it or it will reach its limit of 70°C quickly where an alarm sounds and you need to act or availability can be compromised. The ARC-1680ix-16 can drive both SAS and SATA parts simultaneously unlike the ARC 1261 ML. Newer ARC1680's like mine also have the faster 1.2GHz IOP. (The 12xx are 800MHz)
 
Originally posted by: Yoxxy
I always thought 1680ix was for SAS.

Also it is a huge card.

I still go back to my original that these guys either a.) sell drugs, b.) won the lottery. If there was a purpose to this computer I would change my opinion, but thus far it has just been spend as much money as possible with very little thought.
Click to expand...

or option C.

They have a massive earning this year and need to dump a ton of money into IT as a tax write off instead of giving it to uncle sam.

Im routing on option C.

Im in the financial business as well, so i know what a good year can bring, however, you guys must of had a shit load of revenue to be dumping that much money into IT to see if you can write it off.

But seriously the 10 SSD's is kinda asking for the people on this forum to attack ya. And usually people pop pictures of all parts.
 
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