SSDs in RAID - SAS vs SATA

Is this raid 0 for a production server, not home use? If for production use, have you updated your resume lately, or considered a major career change?

If I were you I would forget everything you know about raid 0 unless you plan on professional or personal suicide.... start off with raid1. Raid 0 has no drive redundancy, just lineally increasing danger. 

The use of SAS SSDs instead of SATA  SSDs  is definitely not mainstream, you willl have a hard time finding  any indepth comparison, if it exists.

Yo might be interested in these benchmark, in Dutch but understandable

tweakers.net/.../13

Yes it's for production use. I'm not being totally stupid here though, believe it or not.

It's for Citrix VDI-In-A-Box which actually recommends RAID0 as a viable option. It doesn't matter if a server suddenly fails due to drive failure. The end user just needs to start a new connection and the remaining servers in the Grid automatically take the load.

" I'm not being totally stupid here though, believe it or not."

I humbly apologize, there are a few legit uses for it. We get quite a few people on the forum who should have a license to hit the power button, and use raid 0 for critical data.... obviously your not one of them; interesting setup/use of SSDs.

 A three drive SSD array (SAS or SATA) must have phenomal throughput with the right raid adapter/interface speed; between that and network interfaces, any motherboard bus would at it's limits.

Tweaker.net does have SAS interfaced SSD benchmarks, but will require searching

http://tweakers.net/benchdb/test/659

http://tweakers.net/benchdb/testcombo/2875

"For this price, I'll buy 6 and put them in RAID10 and laugh all the way to the bank. I doubt we'll ever get a server failure now we'll be using RAID10"

Though in your case, you have a legit use of raid 0.

WOW, WOW WOW , a 6 drive SSD r10     My dream array.... at the moment I am in love with my single Kingston SSD on my 4.9 Ghz OCed desktop. A 4 drive r10 would be no slacker either. Sounds like you have the resources, you might consider a hotspare or at least have a coldspare on hand.

I did find some SAS based SSD results on tweakers.net, they are scattered, I edited the last post , so re-read . There are likely many, you just need to find them.

The issue I have with the benchmarks I noted, they are on PCI based Areca adapters. Great performing adapters but support structure (or lack of it), scares me but if you could possibly lose the data, this is another possibility, which brings up the issue of the use of the Dell drive bay with an Areca. You might also look at LSi Logic adapters, they may have a newer generation adapter than Dell.

Check out multiple reviews/compatibility, and user comments of the SSDs you plan to purchase.  I see rave reviews/benchmarks, then a few months pass and you see the negatives, such as odd drops (larger then normal) in speed over time or higher then normal failures.  For safety with SSDs I clone to a SATA drive for a quick restore, just in case.

I wish I had a client with resources for something like this.

Great, thanks for your help. I've also found no evidence that SAS is better than SATA for SSDs. I've also found some SSDs which are 1/6 of the price of the Dell SATA ones (£265 vs £1590), with excellent reliability and performance even under heavy load and a 5 year warranty (OCZ Vertex 4 256MB).

For this price, I'll buy 6 and put them in RAID10 and laugh all the way to the bank. I doubt we'll ever get a server failure now we'll be using RAID10.

Thanks again.

This is about as much as there is right now about the H710:

www.support.dell.com/.../UG_PERC8_en.pdf

Yeah, I feel very lucky and very excited to be working on this project!

I've found some people online who are using non-Dell SSDs with a PERC H700 with no glitches.

However, you can saturate the PERC H700's 2Gbps using just 2 SSDs in RAID0. I'm now looking at the PowerEdge R720 servers because they have a PERC H710 controller which *might* be able to make full use of 6 SSDs in RAID10.

I don't suppose you know much about the H710 vs the H700?

Thanks Flash for for the addition.

"I've found some people online who are using non-Dell SSDs with a PERC H700 with no glitches."

Tough going with certified with the retail pricing and the warranty length, I can take the warning/log entries about the uncertified drives.

"However, you can saturate the PERC H700's 2Gbps using just 2 SSDs in RAID0."  Yes thats an issue, as is the system bus utilization.

" I don't suppose you know much about the H710 vs the H700?"

Have not hit a H700 series (h700,710)  yet but they appear to have the same components/specs,same interface speed, NV cache can vary, cached ram speed maybe different (800 vs 1333 ?) depending on the adapter variants.

I  bid you fair well, I need to head out to a client.