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TEST SETUP AND METHODOLOGY
In testing the ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101, along with all enterprise drives, we focus on long term stability. In doing so, we stress products not only to their maximum rates, but also with workloads suited to enterprise environments.
We use many off-the-shelf tests to determine performance, but we also have specialized tests to explore specific behaviors we encounter. With enterprise drives, you will see that we do not focus on many consumer level use-cases.
Our hope is that we present tangible results that provide relevant information to the buying public.
LATENCY
To specifically measure latency, we use a series of 512b, 4K, and 8K measurements. At each block size, latency is measured for 100% read, 65% read/35% write, and 100% write/0% read mixes.
For average latency, the Cloud Disk Drive 101 gave us some really interesting results, especially the 4KB workload. As you can see, the results for read, write and mixed are almost identical. That is definitely not normal for an SSD, but for a DRAM based product with symmetrical r/w performance, it looks about right. The CDD 101 also excels at small block transfers. As you can see, the 512B performance is one of the highest we have ever seen.
Maximum latency was also excellent. Typically, we see maximums in the 5-20ms range. For all of our tests, we never topped 1ms, which is very impressive.
ADVANCED WRITE TESTING
As we talked about in our Micron P400m SSD Review, SSDs have different performance states. Since the ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101 is an enterprise storage device, we will focus on steady state performance. With the following tests, we stressed the drive using random 4KB write workloads across the entire span for at least 24 hours. This is more than enough to achieve steady state. The following graph is showing the latency and IOPS across an 11 hour span.
Here is the deal with the ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101; it behaves so unlike an SSD that many of our long-term tests are unnecessary. For a NAND-based SSD, we spend countless hours coaxing them into steady-state. Because the CDD 101 does not have NAND and doesn’t have to worry about P/E cycles, there aren’t different performance states, just steady-state. That is a major benefit of this product is that whether you are 1 second or several days into a run, the performance is identical.
Since we normally run our SSDs with a 4KB workload, the ALLONE does not show its 470,000 IOPS that it can do at 512B. But, what we did see was a very respectable 118,000 IOPS. The performance was also very consistent, with just a few data points in the 120,000 IOPS region.
This was probably one of the easiest storage products to test that we have even had in our labs. It would be reassuring, as a customer, to know that your performance is guaranteed no matter how long your run your test.
4? Random Reads @ QD1 reached 60KIOPS or am i starting to grow old ‘n’ losing my vision ?
How much for this?
ummm $15000
Oh wow, I thought it was only $6k. $15k for consumer grade ram, with consumer grade SD cards with gen 1 pci-e. Pass.
An overpriced solution in search of a problem. At 32GB about the only thing I could see it being used for is a high speed scratch area for database queries. Fortunately, I could just use a regular RAMdisk for that at almost no cost.
I expect to see these featured at overstock.com in the near future………
Read the results and realize where the limit is.
Most SSD are IOps limited, this thing is bandwidth limited. At QD32, it does not matter if you are doing 512B, 4k or 128k, multiply the Iops by the payload and you get the same limit (~600MB/s). They are limited by their PCIe gen1 x4.
Their RAM should be good for 32bits*4*1600Mbps=25.6GB/s.
If they can increase their RAM support (to 16GB or more SODIMM), have equivalent MicroSD (bunch of 16GB) and raise their bus to gen3 (4GB/s) or even better widen it to x8 or x16, then they may have an interesting product.
Until then, it will be *much* cheaper (and with better perfs) to dedicate some RAM for the same task…
I have no idea what this product is supposed to be used for. It’s pci-e 1x, no clue why, limits the bandwidth as you said. I’d like to see this with gen3 pciE and either a x8 or even x16 slot. If you need some low latency transactional ram, you purchase more ram. 16GB sticks are around 170 bucks for 1866mhz DDR3 ECC RAM, and around the 220 range for DDR4 2133. I can purchase a hell of a lot of ram before I’d use something like this, and even have so much money left over that I could put battery backups on top of my battery backups ensuring that the server doesn’t go down.
Additionally, this product seems about as enterprise grade as using a Samsung 840 Evo for your high-write database server. The fact that it uses 1600mhz commodity RAM with no ECC, commodity grade SD cards (That confuses me the most) and is priced at $6k mean that nobody will use this ever unless these are addressed.
Please stop making statements like “this is not an SSD”. It is! SSDs cover ALL solid state technologies for storage. While SSDs have become synonymous with flash storage in recent years, the two terms are not interchangeable. Enterprise storage companies rarely use the term SSD because it is non-descriptive of the underlying technology. They prefer to use terms like Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD).
With the performance of this, you’re better off getting 2011 platform (which supports 64GB of ram) ram disk software and a decent UPS. Its gonna end up much cheaper and faster.
with the storage you can install windows on it, while a ramdrive can’t do that ..;)
Still too much, if it was like 150-200 euros I might consider it
LOL 15K with that money I’d get ultradimm, SSD on ram slots.
So enterprise is willing to pay 15k USD for this, but apparently not the significantly less it’d cost to get 1TB of RAM in a machine and use a chunk of it as a RAM drive… Yeah right.
They have approximately the right market, but they have over priced an under-performing product. I agree with others that it needs at least PCIe 2.0 x8 and ECC DRAM to be worth half the asking price. But, I found this review because I do have need of a small, fast, infinite write, non-volatile storage for my mail server message queues. So, keep at it.
What a fucking ripoff!!!
What I want is a cheap unpopulated PCI card that will take all my old 256M, 512M, and 1GB DDR ram sticks and let me use it as a ramdisk for my swap file and temp folders. It’s not worth the effort to sell them and there are only so many keychains I need.