Holding up the storage World tomorrow's sun? Interpreting Intel SSD 910

As data centers continue to grow, the need for user storage is growing, and the bottleneck in traditional storage systems is becoming more pronounced. The mechanical structure of the hard drive has been unable to meet the requirements, and all of this will change with the arrival of http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/15579.html "> SSD" (ssd,solid State disk).

At this year's IDF conference, Intel exhibited its own PCI interface of SSD hard disk--SSD 910,ssd910 mainly for data center applications, in order to increase the throughput of system data, Intel hopes to replace all the hard drives with solid-state drives to achieve. Let's take a detailed understanding of this Intel storage new---SSD 910 solid State Drive.

Intel SSD 910 Solid State Drive

SSD is to discard the traditional magnetic media, the use of electronic storage media for data storage and reading of a technology, break through the traditional mechanical hard disk performance bottlenecks, has a very high storage performance, is made of solid-state electronic memory chip array of hard disk, composed of control unit and storage unit two parts. The storage unit is responsible for storing the data, and the control unit is responsible for reading and writing the data. In terms of storage units, SSD 910 uses a 25nm process, optimized MLC NAND flash, smaller size, and incorporates Intel Het high reliability Technology, which is a good flash technology to achieve better durability. The previously used SLC does not achieve high durability, and now the MLC of the NAND-controller algorithm has enabled Intel to upgrade its performance by about 30 times times, allowing for up to 10 full writes a day for five consecutive years. SSD 910 currently offers only two capacity versions, a total flash capacity of 448GB, 896GB, but part of it is used as redundancy and only 400GB, 800GB are actually available.

The split structure of SSD 910

In the control unit, SSD 910 uses the Intel plus Third-party combination solution, but the master Intel uses its own chip. SSD 910 consists of two or three PCB stacks consisting of half-high, half-length expansion cards, the first of which has two or four SAS SSD controllers, and the SSD modules are connected by SAS and can be split and used. The front of the main control is a LSI 2008 SAS/PCI-E Bridge chip, and then access to the PCI system bus interface, can be said to be a PCI bridge four sets of NAND flash array, but does not support hardware RAID. Intel said that two years ago, the controller technology is relatively backward, but now it has caught up, SSD 910 with Intel's own controller, the future products will not necessarily adopt their own controller, whether the use of Third-party controller program depends on Intel on product performance requirements, but will ensure the best quality.

In terms of data transfer, SSD 910 employs the PCI 2.0 interface, rather than the PCI 3.0 interface previously guessed, Intel says PCI 2.0 provides sufficient bandwidth and data throughput, so this product does not require PCI 3.0 interfaces, However, products based on the PCI 3.0 interface will be introduced later. Because of the semi-high PCI design, despite the use of multilayer PCB, but only need to occupy a single expansion slot, and no additional heat dissipation, so SSD 910 solves the problem of disk-bit shortage, can be combined or used independently, easy to deploy, and is to improve performance, Continuous writing can be as high as 1.5gb/s, an SSD 910 performance equivalent to the previous 8 block using a RAID 0 mode of traditional hard disk, visible system performance is greatly improved.

SSD 910 Array

Service life, Intel can guarantee 5 years of normal service life, as for the price, prices are always blocking SSD hard to popularize a major factor, 400GB is 1929 U.S. dollars, 800GB is 3859 U.S. dollars, less than five dollars per gigabyte, compared to the traditional mechanical hard disk is still sky-high. There may be a drop in prices after mass production, but it will take some time to drop to a consumer-level price.