Data Recorder Project

~40,000 to spend on a data recorder and I'm looking to build my own (remember the airplane project?)

Well, the time has come that I need to peice this thing together. Now, what I need is ~500mb read/write speeds. What would be the perfect scenario would be that I have a box full of pci-e ssd HDs, but space is limited and am I really going to find a motherboard to support 4+ of these?

So, this is what I'm looking at. I'm planning on getting two to four of these raid 0 then dumping the data onto another storage platform. What do you guys think? I haven't been able to find anything else that comes with the size that I need and the speed that I want. Maybe going with this motherboard.

Did you $4,000...not $40,000?

Also there are plenty of Mobos that will support 4x of those PCIe SSDs

No... I meant $40,000.

nitro, could you show me the motherboards?

Asus P6T7 has 7 PCI-E 16x would be my best guess.

Thanks Freak. I'll look into this and keep you up to date. I'm not off to find a rugged case and build my system.

Ok, going with 4 of these OCZ z Drive p84 1TB and the motherboard mentioned above. Can't wait to get my hands on these.

Do you mind discussion what the project is for and how you came to define your requirements?

This machine is going to be collecting radar information.

Originally Posted by ben chi(f4)

This machine is going to be collecting radar information.

Can you elaborate? For what purpose? What platform? I had no idea radars could generate that quantity of data.

its hard to believe radars produce that kind of data...

I would roll my own PCI-SSD solution. The prepackaged ones use a crappy raid chip.

Do this:
Supermicro SC216 series 24x 2.5" slots
24x SSD of the size of your choice. At 256 GB, that's 6 TB total. I would go with Vertex Turbo with 1.41 firmware
3x LSI 9260 8i
Supermicro X8DAH+-F has enough PCI-E slots (you can put a 8x card in a 16x slots)

The bulk of the cost is in SSD which is around 23k. This build would cost less than your budget.

And after you build this, you can software raid the three raid controllers together. They are rated at 1.7 GB/s. We want to see the 5.1GB/s benchmark!

$40k? Buy, not build. If you decide to build it anyway, don't use any consumer parts. Your board should be Supermicro, not Gigabyte. Those PCIe SSDs that you linked to are a bloody ripoff as well. They are literally 4 SSDs attached to an LSI RAID card (which they charge a premium for when you could do it yourself for less with the appropriate case). Do yourself a favour and buy a nice SAN or server instead of building it yourself.

Yea, 40K system down and ya gotta call the egg or rma/refurb crap. That's a bad way tp strectch 40K.

What underlying technology are you using to store the data coming in?

Ie: database, flat file system, etc?

Originally Posted by Journier

its hard to believe radars produce that kind of data...

Is it really? We're easily pushing transfer rate 2Gbps.

Originally Posted by MonkeyGod

Can you elaborate? For what purpose? What platform? I had no idea radars could generate that quantity of data.

I can't.

Ok, so I just got an e-mail from the Photofastssd guys and the long and short:

Originally Posted by photofast

Maybe they took it off because MLC NAND Flash has skyrocketed in price. 512GB is currently about $3039.

I'm waiting on the price for the 1tb 1GB/s drives so we can get 2x of these in the case. That supermicro mobo looks good too, although I don't think I'm going with that case since I won't be using the SATA/SAS drives.

Originally Posted by Pyrolisitcal

Do this:
Supermicro SC216 series 24x 2.5" slots
24x SSD of the size of your choice. At 256 GB, that's 6 TB total. I would go with Vertex Turbo with 1.41 firmware
3x LSI 9260 8i
Supermicro X8DAH+-F has enough PCI-E slots (you can put a 8x card in a 16x slots)

The bulk of the cost is in SSD which is around 23k. This build would cost less than your budget.

And after you build this, you can software raid the three raid controllers together. They are rated at 1.7 GB/s. We want to see the 5.1GB/s benchmark!

This also sounds like a pretty good option... will keep it in mind.

Originally Posted by ben chi(f4)

Ok, so I just got an e-mail from the Photofastssd guys and the long and short:


I'm waiting on the price for the 1tb 1GB/s drives so we can get 2x of these in the case. That supermicro mobo looks good too, although I don't think I'm going with that case since I won't be using the SATA/SAS drives.


This also sounds like a pretty good option... will keep it in mind.

If you need more write speed, you can trade it for space.

The Vertex EX are SLC with higher write speed but less space

the ones I'm looking at are 1GB/s read/write.

Originally Posted by Photofastssd(e-mail)

Checking.

Please realize that the ATTO benchmark shows these to be about 500MB/S read and write which is 1/2 the claim which is confirmed with the CrystalMark benchmark. I think that benchmark is relying on the cache.

If you want higher speeds, we recommend buying (4) V5 SSDs. The PCI-E G-Monster has (4) of the V3 (earlier slower models) mounted to a Promise RAID Card. This PCI-E G-Monster SSD is bootable.

I think I'm going to go with Pyrolistical's build.

Pyro, how fast do you think the write speed will be?

With Vertex EX its about 200 MB/s seq write per drive. Each 9260 8i has a max throughput of 1.7 GB/s, so with 8 drives you can hope for 1.6 GB/s. But it'll definitely be less, but I would guess definitely more than 1 GB/s. So with three raid cards for 24 drives you'll have around 3 GB/s seq write