OCZ Talos : enterprise-class 3.5" SSD

[CougTek]

News link (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20110515093655_OCZ_Announces_Enterprise_Grade_960G B_Solid_State_Drive.html)

OCZ Technology Group, a leading provider of solid-state drives, has announced its new enterprise-grade solid-state drive (SSD) with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface along with proprietary controller architecture. The new Talos drives combine high reliability with high capacity (from 200GB to 960GB) and maximized input/output performance.

Talos SSDs are available in 3.5" form factors (2.5" to follow) and range from 200GB to 960GB. Talos SAS SSDs deliver speed with up to 64 000 4K random IOPS [input/output operations per second] and are specifically optimized for enterprise storage applications,...

[...]

The drives also deliver reliability features including superior power loss protection, endurance, encryption, and ECC protection.

OCZ Talos series leverages proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology which provides customers with robust enterprise features including Trim, SMART monitoring, native command queuing (NCQ), tagged command queuing (TCQ), power fail management and wear-leveling.
It would still be impossible to recover datqa in case the drive's controller dies, unlike magnetic drives.

[Chewy509]

Interesting, but I wonder how good OCZ "Enterprise" support is, based on passed experience?

How much testing will they do with large OEMs to ensure that their drives work without issues on the more popular RAID controllers out there? Or will they simply blame the RAID controller for issues?

[Stereodude]

This certainly seems like a product to stay far away from.

[ddrueding]

How much testing will they do with large OEMs to ensure that their drives work without issues on the more popular RAID controllers out there? Or will they simply blame the RAID controller for issues?

Do you think there are any RAID vendors out there with products that properly support any SSDs out of the box? I haven't seen an "SSD" setting in any of the firmwares, and I would imagine that such a thing would be necessary to maximize performance and compatibility. This is why I get SSDs that came with their own RAID card or attach the SSDs directly.

[Chewy509]

Do you think there are any RAID vendors out there with products that properly support any SSDs out of the box?

Granted. But when someone touts "Enterprise" I immediately think 5-10+ drive arrays (at the smaller end) and decent RAID controllers.

These might be useful for smaller installations in the SMB sector where there is no RAID controller present (thinking single server situations, with everything on it - come to think of it, I wonder what performance improvement would be seen in a MS Small Business Server setup with both SQL, IIS and Exchange being utilised). But for anything with more than a few drives, and a RAID controller, the lack of TRIM pass-through support, might see limited take-up.

Out of interest, does anyone have figures from Intel for the X25-E that are actually installed in enterprise environments (by IBM, HP, EMC, etc) vs home users wanting to have the biggest e-Penis. (The only one I can think of, off the top of my head, is the Sun/Oracle Thumper Storage server, which uses SSDs for cache as part of the ZFS setup. But in that case, no RAID controller is present as ZFS handles the RAID/VM setup itself).

[Handruin]

I don't believe EMC uses Intel SSD drives. They use some other less mainstream company. I'm trying to track it down, I had asked a while back but can't find it in my email.

[time]

Can anyone work out how TRIM would pass through a RAID controller?

[Mercutio]

Hardware RAID usually abstracts the array(s) as a single volume presented to the OS so... no.

[LunarMist]

This certainly seems like a product to stay far away from.

Perhaps Seagate could buy them to run their servers for processing hard drive RMAs. ;)