Monday, May 4th 2009

DDRdrive LLC Claims 300,000 IOPS with Hybrid PCI-E x1 Solid-State Drive

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DDRdrive LLC, another fighter in the SSD market arena, on Monday introduced the DDRdrive X1 - a PCI-Express expansion card featuring a complete solid-state storage system designed for IOPS intensive tasks. The DDRdrive X1 is a PCIe Gen 1-based hybrid SSD, that combines 4 GB of DDR memory and 4 GB of NAND flash memory. Both solid-state technologies work in concert to provide the superior characteristics of DRAM (speed, reliability, and longevity) with the NAND part used for backups. In terms of read/write speeds, the DDRdrive X1 is not that spectacular. Limited by the PCIe x1 interface it can "only" do about 215 MB/s in reads and 155 MB/s in writes. But it's the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), where X1 really shines. A single drive can hit 300,000+ IOPS Random 512B Reads and 200,000+ IOPS Random 512B Writes. That's a massive bump in operation speed compared to practically all other solid-state drives currently in production. For comparison Fusion IO's enterprise drives are estimated at 200,000 IOPS 512B read, while other consumer SSDs are rated at about 100,000 IOPS 512B read. And those 300,000+ IOPS can be achieved with a maximum power draw of only 9.91 Watts. DDRdrive X1 can also be configured to work in striped (performance) RAID 0, mirrored RAID 1, or RAID 5 regimes.
The DDRdrive X1 is shipping now for $1495 with a 5 year limited warranty. For more information, please be sure to check this page here.
Source: DDRdrive LLC

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27 Comments on DDRdrive LLC Claims 300,000 IOPS with Hybrid PCI-E x1 Solid-State Drive

#1
lemonadesoda
Hybrid device; nice idea but insanely expensive. Total size of this thing is 8GB. But is actually 4GB of storage since 4GB is volatile and the flash "mirrors" the volative (alternatively, just think of the volatile as being a huge cache). That works out at nearly $400 per GB, whereas a comparatine Intel ENTERPRISE SSD is approx $12 per GB. (Non enterprise edition is $4 per GB)

So they want approx 20x the price compared to the Intel Enterprise. That just isnt going to sell. You can RAID an Intel for greater IOPs if you need to. For the same price as this hybrid you can buy 3 Intel X25-E plus a controller, set them up in RAID, get better performance, and have approx 100GB of storage compared to 4GB.
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#2
h3llb3nd4
R40for 1 gig
:twitch:
Even the 2 TB WD HDD is cheaper than that!!
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#3
Deleted member 3
Too little too late and costing too much? We've had DDR RAMdrives for years. You can buy them on ebay for like $100 (without memory). Surely they're SATA, but still you can fill ~8 of them and RAID them. And why not use cheaper DDR2? Use 2 or more controllers for more memory. Or just make it a lot cheaper. 4GB at that price is a ripoff.
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#4
lemonadesoda
While I stand by what I said earlier, those performance stats look good: www.ddrdrive.com/ddrdrive_bench.pdf

However, on another spec. sheet it takes over 60 seconds to load the NAND into volatile, and vice-versa. That is just a TERRIBLE design and shows that somehow performance stats cant be right. How can they have a system that is supposed to be SO FAST yet the bandwidth from NAND to volative is just 4GB/60 sec = just 66MB/sec. A HDD can keep up with those speeds.

Somewhere something doesnt add up with this drive. I'll be avoiding it. No need to spend a fortune on speculation.
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#5
caleb
This is some juice for databases. I would love that kinda IO for some tables :)
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#6
Deleted member 3
lemonadesodaHow can they have a system that is supposed to be SO FAST yet the bandwidth from NAND to volative is just 4GB/60 sec = just 66MB/sec. A HDD can keep up with those speeds.
Simple, the flash is used as backup. Considering they wanted to keep the device affordable they cheapened out on the flash. Now you can buy it for $1495 instead of $1500.
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#7
D4S4
DanTheBanjomanAnd why not use cheaper DDR2?
I wondered the same thing but then i remembered my s939 configuration, i literally PWN3D DDR2 with much lower latency of the good ol' DDR (even though it was "only" running @466MHz, compared to 667MHz+ DDR2)
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#8
lemonadesoda
DanTheBanjomanSimple, the flash is used as backup. Considering they wanted to keep the device affordable they cheapened out on the flash. Now you can buy it for $1495 instead of $1500.
Exactly my point. They have used slow cheap flash memory for the permanent storage and only the volatile RAM is fast. At these prices, the NAND falsh should be just as fast as an enterprise SSD and should be able to do a full park of data within 5 seconds, not a whole minute.

Appalling.

The design should be as good as an Intel enterprise SSD, with the option to add sticks of volatile "cache".
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#9
Disparia
DDRdrive? Didn't they start up or announce this device three or so years ago? Might explain the use of DDR.
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#10
Hayder_Master
it is look like gigabyte i ram , but gigabyte more cheap
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#11
W1zzard
this thing is designed for a very small niche. servers that work with <4 gb of data to which they need an insanely high concurrent number of accesses, which cant run off disk for that reason, which cant run in ramdisk or main memory.

i havent found a killer application scenario yet where the same could be achieved for much less :(
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#12
iStink
lemonadesodaHybrid device; nice idea but insanely expensive. Total size of this thing is 8GB. But is actually 4GB of storage since 4GB is volatile and the flash "mirrors" the volative (alternatively, just think of the volatile as being a huge cache). That works out at nearly $400 per GB, whereas a comparatine Intel ENTERPRISE SSD is approx $12 per GB. (Non enterprise edition is $4 per GB)

So they want approx 20x the price compared to the Intel Enterprise. That just isnt going to sell. You can RAID an Intel for greater IOPs if you need to. For the same price as this hybrid you can buy 3 Intel X25-E plus a controller, set them up in RAID, get better performance, and have approx 100GB of storage compared to 4GB.
No more comments were needed after this one LOL! :laugh:
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#14
FreedomEclipse
~Technological Technocrat~
I remember Gigabyte having made a similar design 2-3years ago call the 'i-Ram'
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#15
Steevo
Choose a beter database would be my thoughts. By the time you add actual overhead to this or go out of its storage area, you are better off moving to something all together better.


However for a business that has a smaller database, as W1zz points out, $1500 is less than a whole new server setup. However the whitesheets are not onthe site that I found. So I could make a grah and spew out numbers too.
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#16
W1zzard
there are lots of scenarios where your working set is <4gb but you have a huge amount of queries to it. however, using memcached or mysql cluster looks more viable to me
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#17
thebeephaha
This thing is pathetic, it's just like the Gigabyte i-RAM with an added 4GB SSD.

Like, seriously, the i-RAM has been out forever.

What this company should have done:

Longer PCI-E 4/8x card (think like big video card long), and shove like.... 16 DDR2 SODIMM slots on the sucker and let it use 32/64GB RAM... then have a 32GB SSD on it or something.
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#18
Steevo
W1zzardusing memcached or mysql cluster looks more viable to me
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#19
lemonadesoda
thebeephahaThis thing is pathetic, it's just like the Gigabyte i-RAM with an added 4GB SSD.

What this company should have done:

Longer PCI-E 4/8x card (think like big video card long), and shove like.... 16 DDR2 SODIMM slots on the sucker and let it use 32/64GB RAM... then have a 32GB SSD on it or something.
Agreed. A SODIMM board, populated on demand by the owner, to provide additional virtual memory for cache and pagefile, to help regular users get more performance without having to move to an expensive server platform with loads of DIMM slots.

e.g. So you have a 4GB system, all slots full. Want to add another 8GB? Drop in a SODIMM board and fill with 4x cheap SODIMMs. OK, it's not as fast as regular DDR2 on the FSB. But its a lot faster than HDD or SSD virtual memory.
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#20
Swansen
kinda like gigabyte i-RAM(just faster)
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#21
h3llb3nd4
Swansenkinda like gigabyte i-RAM(just faster)
Yeah and more pricey
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#22
Disparia
Hey guys, have you heard of that device that Gigabyte put out a couple years ago? This is just like it in every way, except for the ways that they're different.
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#24
W1zzard
too bad the reviewer didnt think about main memory/ram disk
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#25
DDRdrive
DDRDrive Representative
Clarifications from the CTO of DDRdrive LLC:

The DDRdrive X1 was singularly designed to target IOPS intensive applications while setting a new standard in performance, power, and price. In other words, a product exclusively targeted for the enterprise market, i.e. not the consumer market.

What's the difference? In a word - IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

The DDRdrive X1 is the highest performing (300,000+ IOPS), most power efficient (33uW/IOPS) and lowest price (0.005 $/IOPS) internal storage device in existence.

For a significant class of applications (database tables, indices, and transaction logs) that are capacity constrained, we are an extremely potent and unique solution.

www.ddrdrive.com/ddrdrive_bench.pdf

The drive for speed,

Christopher George
Founder/CTO
DDRdrive LLC
www.ddrdrive.com
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