Intel SSD 910 Series

[idata]

OK, I just installed the SSD 910 800 GB card in my workstation with an S5520SC system board.

NOW WHAT?

There does not seem to exist a User Guide anywhere I can find. If there is one, can someone please point me to it.

I have the Intel® Solid-State Drive Data Center Tool User Guide, but that is not particularly helpful.

I thought this thing would look like a disk after installing it and the drivers, but it looks like 4 disks. Am I supposed to use the Windows software RAID, or is there some hardware RAID option?

Cheers, Eric

[UHans]

The 910 presents its storage to the OS as four SCSI LUNs. There is no built-in RAID option. You have to run OS software RAID to pool the storage space of the separate controller/flash channels or manually spread your data/workload between the channels (there is a fair amount of flash redundancy within each channel. RAID 1+0 across all four channels would also protect against a channel controller failure)

[idata]

OK, now I feel like a total moron for spending over $4,000 for this device.

The only reason I purchased this product was because I thought I could boot from it - which I still cannot do.

Now I find that is actually for discrete drives - with no hardware RAID - which means I cannot use it for the application for which I decided to purchase it.

I must say that Intel's marketing literature on the device is abysmal because it is not at all clear on that point that it is really 4 devices instead of one.

Can someone please explain why the literature on this device is so poor?

- Eric

[idata]

I also feel bad. We just purchase two INTEL 910 SSD and plan purchase more. If SSD 910 not support hardware RAID, I think we will stop it.

Based on Redhat say software RAID will drop SSD performance a lot. It is NO advantage to use SSD any more.

=========================From Redhat Doc. ====================================

Red Hat also warns that software RAID levels 1, 4, 5, and 6 are not recommended for use on SSDs. During the initialization stage of these RAID levels, some RAID management utilities (such as mdadm) write to all of the blocks on the storage device to ensure that checksums operate properly. This will cause the performance of the SSD to degrade quickly.

[idata]

According to The http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-910-pcie-ssd-review-amazing-performance-results-in-both-40... SSD Review Forum Software RAID 0 performance is really no better than direct access. I find this quite startling and wonder what is wrong with the device and/or Windows RAID that there is no effective performance gain with RAID 0.

I'm pretty sure that FusionIO and OCZ use hardware RAID on their devices to improve performance - but I am not sure. Given that the Software RAID performance is so low, I wonder what Intel were thinking (or not thinking) when they designed and tested this product. Also, with hardware RAID it would have been more straightforward to make the device bootable.