Gadgetory

welcome to Linus tech tips at CES 2013 our trip to the show this year is powered by Corsair maker of quality PC components and peripherals our trusted storage partner is Seagate technology and our trusted networking partner is Linksys in the OCZ suite on the consumer side we start with the vertex 3 so this is a SAN force based Drive honestly the problem with something like a SAN force base Drive at this point in time is that pretty much everyone and their dog has a SandForce Drive so you just have to rely on add-ons like extra warranty or you know just that sort of the the general brand perception in order to drive sales so vertex 4 was an obvious an obvious thing for us easy to do after they acquired into links it does use a third-party controller the actual physical controller on the chip but it uses an end links firmware so they're calling that the Everest 2 platform and it achieves performance that in almost any case is as good as the vertex 3 but in cases where you're dealing with incompressible data is actually better so it's a more consistent experience right here we have the latest drive that OC Z's launch so these two are gonna be the ones they're more focused on moving forwards with their in the Lynx technology inside this one not only uses an in delink firmware to control the SSD itself but it also has the barefoot three controller which is the first silicon that was actually designed in-house by OCZ to deliver the best possible performance this drive took something along the lines of 18 months to bring to market so they were already working on this six months before CES last year it has a five-year warranty and it has industry-leading performance it is right up there with any other tuna 1/2 inch SSD drive because that is pretty much as good as we can do for a two and a half inch SATA 3 Drive at this point because the SATA interface is getting pretty close to the limit so let's talk about what we can do if we move beyond the SATA interface now we've seen Revo drive products from OCZ in the past and they're doing away with that branding this time or maybe they're not it looks like there's a yeah specifications are preliminary and subject to change so this is the vector PCIe this is going to use to into links barefoot three controllers it uses 32 and chips it comes with cloning software it has a five year warranty it's gonna be available in capacities up to one terabyte and it uses a PCI Express Gen 2 4x interface giving it a theoretical maximum bandwidth of two gigabytes per second now in the real world it's capable of achieving about one gigabyte per second and you're gonna see that on the screen to my right your left but there's a lot of overhead involved in the PCI Express interface so really to get ahead of this in terms of performance they'd either have to add more lanes making it an 8 X card or move to PCIe gen3 now with these storage devices there's a lot of validation that goes into them because most PCI Express slots on motherboards on the motherboard manufacture side are only really validated with mainstream stuff like graphics cards and sound cards so in the past there have been some finicky issues so moving ahead to the newest technology that at this point is only even supported on Intel and not even on the AMD side might not have made sense and honestly looking at previous generation products you didn't see the same kind of scaling going from 2 controllers to 4 controllers that you saw going from 1 to 2 so speaking of the performance scaling from 1 to 2 you can see that compared to what a single drive is able to do on the SATA 3 interface we're able to see consistent performance above sort of anything above about 32 kilobytes where you're sitting around Hubble's still above 800 megabytes per second reads and writes this drive can consistently deliver about a thousand megabytes per second reads and writes so this is comparable to something that I had to build for myself using an LSI card that cost me about 700 bucks and back in the sand Force One days I needed 8 drives to achieve that kind of performance so we're only a few generations ahead of that but we're already looking at performance that's basically space-age compared to what we had not that long ago in our vector SSD unboxing we talked about how OCC is changing their image redefining their processes internally and trying to refocus right now so let's have a look at sort of the the existing generation of enterprise SSDs I don't know if you guys are familiar with these or not but this one was actually at CES last year already it's available in up to 3 point 2 terabyte capacities and I know the internet loves to talk about sort of the one terabyte drives that are out or coming out or but the reality of it is though Suzie's had things like you know 3.2 terabyte drives on PCIe 800 terabyte drives using a SAS interface on tuna 1/2 inch form factor for actually quite a while now so it's it's interesting I mean this is this is all that stuff that we've seen before but I have Jerome here from OCZ to tell us about something that's actually all-new and uses unlike these previous generation solutions which are using sand force controllers sand force sand force driven kind of firmware updates this guy right here is actually using OCC's own intellectual property so tell us about the intrepid three right so thanks so this is our intrepid 3 products this is our next-generation Santa product so as you mentioned this is using our in-house controller Everest to controller and this is gonna be an evolution of our existing set of products like our deneva 2 so with intrepid 3 you're gonna get higher performance for sequential also higher performance for random input/output operations per second and this one's also optimized for incompressible data boniva 2 is optimized for compressible and intrepid threes gonna give you a really great performance for incompressible data so these two solutions are potentially complementary to each other okay so I mean it's there's a lot of guys that make SSDs so I think the differentiation really comes from a few different factors so number one is the variety of the solutions number two is gonna be the support that's provided number three quality of the components that are being used and number four is gonna be sort of how you guys differentiate yourselves in the market and sort of that that X Factor thing so this is something we discussed on our live stream we do the live streams every Friday night when ocz announced this but ocz has a solution now for accelerating volumes whether it's using a PCIe solution a SATA solution a solution on Linux platforms as well as what other platforms so why don't you tell us we're gonna wait for this demo to restart at the beginning and we're gonna get drum to walk us through it okay so here we're showing OCC's new solution for linux acceleration this is our lxl platform so what we're doing here is we're showing in our stores pro excel management software you can see we have de Nieva and a z drive Oh see see volumes installed and what we're doing here is we're selecting the existing volumes that you want to accelerate so we're picking the OCZ volumes here as cache volumes and our Excel software automatically you know pre discovers all the volumes and here you can see the existing volumes that you're going to accelerate so we're selecting those so what we've done so far is we've already selected the OCZ volumes they'd be uses cache now we're selecting the volumes to be accelerated and here you can see we're selecting the policies to be used for the acceleration so essentially these will tell you what data to put in the cache what's the hot data so we have some pre-configured algorithms as well as you can select custom algorithms so now there we've selected the volumes now they're accelerated and we're gonna move over you can see in the summary all the four volumes that were installed are now accelerated with the OCZ deneva and the OCZ to be clear guys the volumes that are being accelerated here are gonna be mechanical volumes that were a site that an SSD volume is then being assigned to to cache now I can tell you guys right now looking at the interface for this assuming it's gonna work this way in the final model check this out guys fifteen fifteen thousand one hundred fifty fifteen thousand total I ops per second which is much better than you can do with any mechanical volume as we're about to see when they actually turn the volume acceleration off this is much easier than what I've seen in implementations from LSI and Adaptec in their raid storage managers and not nearly as restrictive because you can take SATA drives you can take PCIe drives you can clump them together you can separate them apart so you could say you've got a 1.6 terabyte Revo drive you go I want one terabyte for dedicated SSD storage I want 600 gigabytes that's gonna actually cache a mechanical volume I have somewhere else on the server this is extremely exciting because up until now there's been no real caching solution for SSD available in Linux at all in spite of that being where most of this most of the server data is actually dealt with now is this just gonna be Linux are you guys gonna have other solutions as well we're gonna have other solutions as well we already have a solution for VMware it's called VXL the Linux solution is called lxl as we've discussed and we can also have a Windows solution which would be called wxl thanks so much Jerome this has been very helpful and don't miss any of our CES 2013 coverage here at the show and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips powered by Corsair Seagate Technology and Lynx's