Intel DQ45EK Mini-ITX LGA775, 4 Sata, 1 E-Sata, 1 PCI-E x1, 26w idle - Works!

[Romir]

That isn't really true now. Even the "cheaper" MLC SSD's with the right controller are superior than a VelociRaptor at everything but sustained writes. The Vertex is good enough to best a VelociRaptor in random 4k writes and the Intel ssds destroys any hard drive in read or write IOPS.

 

Anandtech has a huge and must read write up of the state of SSDs as of a month ago. Since then the Vertex drives have gotten even faster with a firmware update and Intel solved their performance degradation problem.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3535 The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=691&type=expert&pid=1 Intel Responds to Fragmentation with New X25-M Firmware

 

Read IOPS. I'd link writes but the ssds are system drives at the moment and can't be wiped. Read and write IOPS are what a proper ssd is all about, and they deliver.

 

Five out of eight of my Seagate 1.5tbs have failed within 3 months FYI. All of them were models without firmware updates. I've been lucky and owned over fifty hard drives with only ONE failure before these so they've left quite an impression. The five drives were also from three different vendors, so it's not like it was a single bad batch or that they were all damaged in transit.

 

I like my Intel X-25M more than my 4ghz hyperthreaded Core i7 which is saying a lot for me. It makes my laptop feel deceptively faster. I wish I had a second 2.5" bay for more storage though. 80gb with Vista's bloat is rough. Windows 7's footprint is much smaller at 8-9gb so that will help in the future, and the TRIM command will be essential.

 

Edit: Added VelociRaptor 150gb hd tune random access test.

[Romir]

Transfer and parity check speeds with Seagate 1.5tb appear to be full speed on this board. Either I was wrong about the speeds before or the cheap heatsink I put on the southbridge helped. It lowered the temperature by a full 20c. My Supermicro board runs fine without one, but I bought for it anyway.

 

http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/misiso.html

 

[smino]

 

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=13

New vs Used SSD Performance

We begin our look at how the overhead of managing pages impacts SSD performance with iometer. The table below shows iometer random write performance; there are two rows for each drive, one for “new” performance after a secure erase and one for “used” performance after the drive has been well used.

 

4KB Random Write Speed New "Used"

Intel X25-E  31.7 MB/s

Intel X25-M 39.3 MB/s 23.1 MB/s

JMicron JMF602B MLC 0.02 MB/s 0.02 MB/s

JMicron JMF602Bx2 MLC 0.03 MB/s 0.03 MB/s

OCZ Summit 12.8 MB/s 0.77 MB/s

OCZ Vertex 8.2 MB/s 2.41 MB/s

Samsung SLC 2.61 MB/s 0.53 MB/s

Seagate Momentus 5400.6 0.81 MB/s -

Western Digital Caviar SE16 1.26 MB/s -

Western Digital VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s -

 

Now keep in mind, Unraid's purpose is not random reads and writes, but more sequential.

So let's loko at the average write speeds:

 

According to Tom's Hardware Guide: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/2009-flash-ssd-charts/Average-WriteTransfer-Performance,718.html

 

 

These values can be double with short stroking drives:

 

 

INTEL X25-M is limited to 75 MB/s write throughput

Intel X25-E 155 MB/s AVG but needs a sas controller I believe.

 

ACARD is reasonable price for video editing!

ACARD ANS-9010 150MB/s write (245$ plus ddr2 cheap ram 40$ for 4GB and up) Problem is sata2 can only go so fast!

510MB/s in raid0. But limited to 64 GB of space.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=11

 

Very cool price for 1TB of insane speed on the PCIe slot!

 

OCZ 1to4TB SSD PCIE card 400-500MB/s Write sustained speeds. 1500$ to 2000$

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/05/oczs-z-drive-puts-1tb-of-blazing-ssd-capacity-in-your-pcie-slot/

 

Fusion Iodrive 1,400MB/sec 

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/11/fusion-io-breaks-out-roomy-nimble-iodrive-duo-ssds/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note that the “used” performance should be the slowest you’ll ever see the drive get. In theory, all of the pages are filled with some sort of data at this point.

 

All of the drives, with the exception of the JMicron based SSDs went down in performance in the “used” state. And the only reason the JMicron drive didn’t get any slower was because it is already bottlenecked elsewhere; you can’t get much slower than 0.03MB/s in this test.

 

These are pretty serious performance drops; the OCZ Vertex runs at nearly 1/4 the speed after it’s been used and Intel’s X25-M can only crunch through about 60% the IOs per second that it did when brand new. Granted there is a new firmware out for it now. I think it is too early for SSD adoption just yet.

The price point does not make it worth while when you can raid cheap drives to gether and get the same performance. I originally thought of using ssd for my cache drive until I did a little research. Besides, the bottleneck will be the network Gige! If you can hit 80MB/s on your Gige, your doing awesome. I think most of us hit 50-60MB/s at most.

 

 

 

 

 

[drive]

Hey there

 

Was thinking about using a DQ45FC (http://www.intel.com/Products/Desktop/Motherboards/DG45FC/DG45FC-overview.htm) for my unRAID server.

 

Has anyone had a go?

 

It seems on paper the two (DQ45EK & DQ45FC) are pretty similar. Benefits for me are cheaper (success!), integrated HDMI, and better GFX chipset.

 

Cheers!

[articulateape]

Refering to the Hardware compatibility page shows that it is currently on level one. I was hoping for some conformation on someone gettting to level two (6 or more drives and continuous usage for a month etc). Has further progress been made on this board?

[Bizarroterl]

I have loaded ~1.75TB onto it without a problem.  I ran a full parity check a few days ago and no problems were found.  Note that I'm using 1 sata for the parity and the 2 data drives are connected to a Sans Digital box via an esata port multiplier.

[geekette]

Added this board to the hardware compatibility page with a link back to this thread.

 

Thanks for being so diligent and posting the syslog and stuff to confirm level 1 testing.  If/When you get to level 2 post back here and I will update the hardware compatibility page.

 

Where is the hardware comptibility page?