Possible to do a RAID 0 of Flash cards?

Yes, I will run them in RAID. My plan now is to buy 2 of some CF card and try things out in RAID-0 and RAID-1. If that works out ok, I will expand to more cards and try out RAID-0,1, and 10. My final goal is to hopefully get a 8-GB RAID-10 setup with ~120MB/s reads, ~60MB/s writes, and <2ms access time. Since I don't want to end up with 8 flash cards that won't work well, I want to move slowly.

I am still looking for a lead on PCIe PATA cards with more than 1 port.
 
it seems like there's not much manufacturers doing PCIe cards for PATA drives. I think they are only making PCI-X versions like 3ware's Escalades..

i would like to do something like that too. Maybe get a 4-port PCI-X PATA raid with 4 x Dual CF converters to do Raid 0.
 
I bought some Transcend 2GB flash cards today from Fry's. I price checked Extreme IVs there, 2GB are $69, but 4GB are only $99, which is damn good afaik.

This is the type of card I bought.
The CF Card's Features List said:
Ultra-performance 120X high-speed with dual channel flash interface.
DMA MODE
Read 20 MB/sec, Write 18 MB/sec.
Click to expand...

I haven't had much luck yet. Under Vista through the LianLi usb reader, I get 1.3mS access times, so that is pretty decent. But read speeds are 7.4 max. Maybe I am hitting the limit of the reader.

I tried using a CF-IDE dual adapter with 1 card and 2 cards inserted. Neither would work with DMA enabled. I think the adapters are at fault, because the transcend cards claim to support DMA. I searched around and there are definitely DMA capable adapters available.

I am going to investigate modifying the adapters I have to support DMA. I suspected, and the adapters I have now confirm, that a CF-IDE adapter is basically just a pin adapter, with hardly any active components on it. I've seen reviews of adapters with no access LED that have none. I think the hard question is: is it possible to create a dual CF-IDE adapter with DMA? I haven't seen any of those for sale, at least any that advertise DMA support. Hopefully I can get at least single card DMA support with just a simple mod to connect some previously unused pins. If not, I guess I'll buy some DMA supporting adapters.

Anyway, the speeds under linux with no DMA are 6.0MB/s read and 7.5MB/s write with the CPU just slammed. I had some disk activity happening in the background, so that might be a little less than the max possible with this PC. It is a Althon XP @ 1529MHz. I imagine a faster computer could get slighty better results under PIO mode, but I don't really feel like trying on the vista PC since it wouldn't boot before. Seeker reports 1.07mS access time, I'm happy with that at least.
 
I just tried it on my Opteron/Vista system and it didn't like it at all. The bios couldn't see my SATA drive anymore and I managed to clear my BIOS settings twice! :mad:
 
taqueso said:
Next step is buying two faster CF cards. I ordered a pair of Extreme IV 2GBs from some guy in Hong Kong at a ridiculously low price, and I expect to get scammed on that one and probably won't ever see them. Of course, if I do get them, I will buy more. :D Can anyone recommend a fast, reliable, and semi-cheap CF card in the 2-4GB range? I am considering this Transcend 120x 2GB card because it scores pretty well on this list of CF benchmarks and it is pretty damn cheap for the speed/size. I do have some reservations because I recently had a Transcend USB stick fail on me, though it had seen quite a bit of use. I don't think I can justify buying the Extreme IVs at regular price, it is just too much to pay for what is really just a fun project.
Click to expand...
http://reviews.ebay.com/Beware-of-F...lash-Cards-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000001235396
Watch out for fake cards on eBay, make sure you check yours out.

Black Friday special, all SanDisk:
2x 2GB UltraII CF, $23 apiece from Circuit City. :)
3x 2GB regular SD, $27 or so- also from CC.

I've got the CF cards running in a dual-adapter right now, nothing fancy- no RAID or anything.

The 3MB/s limitation would be feasible for interface conversions, like ATA-SATA. However, CF is fully ATA-compatible, so the IDE converter is really just a bunch of pin passthroughs. The only limitation is the card itself.
 
naro said:
hi taqueso, may i know which Raid card are you going to use??
Click to expand...

I am going to be using the linux software RAID, so I don't need a hardware RAID card. But I will need some extra IDE controllers. I haven't really gotten which card figured out exactly, but I am looking at this ByteCC card although it is a little expensive. There is also this Koutech card, but it gets awful reviews. I wish I could find a card with 2 IDE controllers..

edit: A little update, I just bought 4 of the adapters mavalpha is using.
 
i see. so you're doing software Raid.

would the performance be better with software or hardware Raid??
 
naro said:
i see. so you're doing software Raid.

would the performance be better with software or hardware Raid??
Click to expand...

That depends on which hardware, and what you're doing with the machine other than RAID. An Intel 960-based card will be outclassed by software raid of any sort. And if you're doing intensive calculations on the CPU, having dedicated hardware for the storage could help.
 
naro said:
would the performance be better with software or hardware Raid??
Click to expand...

A good hardware raid solution will be faster, especially if the CPU is heavily used. I am planning on this going into a dual-core system, so it shouldn't be too bad. My other RAID arrays are software and they work great. RAID-0 and RAID-1 are very simple, so it is much easier to do those in software. RAID-5 (and 6) really suffer.
 
I got my CF-IDE adapters today. I am now limited by the max transfer speed of multi-word dma2, 16MB/s. If I try to run two cards at once master/slave, I get 8MB/s from each and 16MB/s in RAID-0. RAID-0 with two IDE channels and both cards as master, I get 32MB/s. Read and write -- actually, write is like 15.85MB/s per card. With no tweaks, I got a seeker result of 0.80ms on the RAID-0 array, and 0.73ms for a single card. With readahead disabled and the io scheduler set to noop, I get 0.51 as the best access time for a single card and .76 for the raid array. I was using a 4k chunk size, I might try some other sizes later.

I wonder if the extreme IV cards support udma.. does anyone have one they can check for me?
 
AFAIK cf is pin compatible with IDE>

I have cf->ide adapters and the only thing on the pcb is traces.

Rob
 
taqueso said:
I got my CF-IDE adapters today. I am now limited by the max transfer speed of multi-word dma2, 16MB/s. If I try to run two cards at once master/slave, I get 8MB/s from each and 16MB/s in RAID-0. RAID-0 with two IDE channels and both cards as master, I get 32MB/s. Read and write -- actually, write is like 15.85MB/s. With no tweaks, I got a seeker result of 0.80ms on the RAID-0 array, and 0.73ms for a single card. With readahead disabled and the io scheduler set to noop, I get 0.51 as the best access time for a single card and .76 for the raid array. I was using a 4k chunk size, I might try some other sizes later.

I wonder if the extreme IV cards support udma.. does anyone have one they can check for me?
Click to expand...

It would be great if you could summarize which contollers and which cards you are using.
 
Hi,

I know a guy from Belgium who is doing much research concerning Flash Memory and SSD. Note: His website is in French language only.

He just tested two SanDisk Extreme III CF as RAID:
http://www.dandu.be/article/article-raid-memoire-flash-test-104.html

This is his flash memory section:
http://www.dandu.be/blog/cat-memoire-flash-14.html

For the speed of some flash memory cards, you can check out my website:
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/

I did not do much testing with CF cards and ATA adapters, because this is very time consuming and frustrating...

Hans-Jürgen
 
Robstar said:
AFAIK cf is pin compatible with IDE>

I have cf->ide adapters and the only thing on the pcb is traces.

Rob
Click to expand...
mavalpha said:
The 3MB/s limitation would be feasible for interface conversions, like ATA-SATA. However, CF is fully ATA-compatible, so the IDE converter is really just a bunch of pin passthroughs. The only limitation is the card itself.
Click to expand...
Yep, you came to the same conclusion I did. Glad I'm not the only crazy one. :)
 
drizzt81 said:
It would be great if you could summarize which contollers and which cards you are using.
Click to expand...

I am using these Transcend 120x CF cards. The CF adapter is this one, which I think is identical to the one that mavalpha linked. I ordered some of mavalpha's type as well, but they didn't arrive yet.

The PC these tests are run on is an athlon XP at 1530MHz with a VIA vt8233a IDE controller. I am using Gentoo Linux, kernel is 2.6.19.

hjreggel said:
I know a guy from Belgium who is doing much research concerning Flash Memory and SSD. Note: His website is in French language only.

For the speed of some flash memory cards, you can check out my website:
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/
Click to expand...
Thank you for the links. I have already been using your site, and it is the reason I selected the transcend flash cards. Thanks for providing a great resource.


In my last post, I asked about udma CF cards. I guess lexar is up the the challenge. As is the Extreme IV (search for udma on that page)
 
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Hi,

Unfortunately, I don't have any time left to work on my website. My regular job is taking up too much time. I hope that this project is finished mid may...

But Dandu does a really great job in maintaining his website. NOTE: "Mo" / "Go" is French for "MB" / "GB" (octet = byte), "lecture" is read, "écriture" is write.

Transcend 266x CF announced:
http://www.dandu.be/blog/news-cartes-compactflash-266x-ultra-chez-transcend-1442.html

A manufacturer called "Buffalo" announced 300x CF:
http://www.dandu.be/blog/news-carte-300x-chez-buffalo-1426.html

And his Compact Flash tests:
http://www.dandu.be/test/cat-compact-flash-11.html

Hans-Jürgen
 
Buy a bigger RAID controller and do RAID-10. Also, you really should figure out a way to make them hot swappable. Opening a case for a drive failure is so pathetic ;)
 
Just a little update, I got my two Sandisk Extreme IV 2GB cards from the Hong Kong dude and surprise surprise, they are fakes. It took so long I had assumed I wouldn't receive anything. They are quite well done fakes, they come in full retail packaging, with CD-ROM, plastic case, a neoprene keychain case, and the card. I hate to say it, but it is Impressive work. I bought two, one appears to be a Sandisk ultra card, and the other is apparently pretty old as it doesn't support DMA. No real benchmarks, but they are pretty damn slow.
 
Most setups I've seen are with slower CF cards with 20MBs reads and 10MBs writes. Two of these in a RAID 0 array only gets you like 40MBs reads and 20MBs writes, much slower than current generation hard drives which average ~70-80MBs. To top it off the cards don't have wear leveling so they burn out in normal environments.

I'd like to see someone on this forum go a litter more extreme and get 12 of the new STEC MACH4 16GB CF cards which have 90MBs reads and 55MBs writes (that's 2x the speed of the current 300x high speed CF cards) http://www.stec-inc.com/product/mach4cf.php. Buy a CF to SATA adapter for each and put it in a 12 port raid controller in RAID 0 for a 192GB DIY SSD drive with a theoretical 1080MBs read and 600MBs write!! The cards are based on SLC NAND (so they get 10x more writes than MLC) and have wear leveling for ultra high endurance. STEC estimates the drive will last 10 years under normal conditions. Anyone want to try this and post their results?
 
Intruiging idea, but I checked one of my electronics suppliers and a Mach 1 8gb drive is $356, $326/unit if you buy 10 or more. Somehow I do not think we'll have any takers.
 
Another possibility along these lines: Addonics makes a PCI card that will take 4 CF cards for $50. Add 4 8GB $40 cards, and you get 32gb of low-latency, decent-STR storage for $190. Or move up to 64GB (using $70 16GB cards) for a total of $330.

Anyone tried these cards? I might replace my Raptor with one or two of these if they don't suck...

Edit: blergh, Sil0680 chipset. Oh well.
 
Hi guys,

i'm wondering if anyone bought those 280x OEM or Samsung CF cards which claims to be able to do 40MB/s read and 36MB/s writes on ebay?? I'm wondering if they can support UDMA mode.

anyone'? thanks
 
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