HP workstations and SFF drives

Some HP servers (that are actually smaller than an HP Z820) can fit up to 16 (yes, sixteen) SFF drives.

HP Proliant ML370 G5 server with a 16-bay backplane

HP Z820

How many can a Z820 fit? Four in standard LFF (Legacy Form Factor) bays (see "8" in the illustration above) and 4-6 more, two per optical bay using an adapter like this:

HP 2.5in HDD 2-in-1 Optical Bay Bracket P/N FX615AA

...or this:

HP Z420 Handle in Top Optical Bay A9A48AA

...that fits in an optical 5.25" bays.

That's a total of ten (eight if there's a DVD drive), while the system has fourteen SAS/SATA ports. You can see where we're going with this.

Why SFF (Small Form Factor) drives? For one, they're the present and immediate future of storage. SSDs are mostly SFF or smaller. SFF drives benefit from less vibration and can be made to higher tolerances. More SFF drives can fit in the same space which means higher speeds when you stripe them, which in turn means you may not need a heavy, bulky, expensive external SAS expander box to house a bunch of drives for those uncompressed 4K workflows.

Enter HP 4-in-1 SFF (2.5in) HDD Carrier (P/N B8K60AA) retailing for $139 and what really is Icy Dock MB994SP-4S. Says so on the label.

This metal device lets you use four SAS or SATA spinning or SSD drives, and has two fans and four SAS ports in the back, in addition to a single Molex 4-pin power connector.Two of those, and you can have a total of 12 drives in the system. Not quite server grade: HP server drive trays are much, much nicer, support hot swapping with the right controller, and their activity light indicate possible fault and RAID set identification, besides, well, activity. This unit's activity lights are tiny, hard to see, and in my experience, don't always work. We've asked HP to come up with server-grade backplanes for the workstations and still hoping it might happen.

How many of these units can fit in a Z820? Theoretically three as there are three "optical" (5.25" half-height) bays in a Z820, two if an internal CD or DVD drive is used. They're a rather tight fit against the CPU fan housing so choose your SATA cables wisely: those with long necks may not work well.

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Intel's 720-series SSDs

Intel's new 720-series SSDs are extremely fast, equally expensive, not yet available, and you can't stick one in a laptop. Stop reading now before it gets worse.

A prototype PCIe SSD Intel demoed in 2009

(The product will only slightly resemble the photo on the right that depicts a prototype Intel demoed in 2009.)

Speed.  Intel 720 Series "Ramsdale" SSDs are rumored to have 2.2GB/s read and 1.8GB/s write speeds. That's Gigabytes, not Gigabits - and represents about a 500% to 1000% speed improvement over current SSDs, not to mention being about 15 times faster than regular spinning disks. The device will easily play or record several uncompressed 4K video streams simultaneously and do many other things that previously required a humongous and energy hungry storage array.

Why do I need one.  The kicker isn't the raw speed or extremely low latencies - it's the compactness of it, and the relatively low buy-in.  Before this and similar devices became available, the only way to achieve such performance was a storage box with at least 24 mechanical hard drives or 8+ SSDs with a RAID controller, connected to the host computer via super-fast multi-link SAS or Fibre Channel connections.  The buy-in is usually north of $10K, often $20K for an enterprise-class solution.  Granted, you get a lot more Terabytes with those - however if it's portability and speed you are after vs. raw capacity - this device will likely be calling your name.

Where do I put it?  As there isn't yet a cable connection fast enough to accommodate such speeds - not even Thunderbolt (aka LighPeak) - the only connection offered is 8-lane PCI Express.  Thus, it won't fit inside a laptop, other than externally via a PCIe expander from Magma or JMR.

Prices.  If current SLC SSD prices of over $10 per gigabyte are any indication, a 200GB version should start at over $2000. It may however boot your PC in a scant few seconds undoubtedly motivating some gamers to spring for their wallets.

Real-world applications: ultra-hi-res (like, uncompressed 4K), multi-stream and ultra high speed field video acquisition and monitoring, enterprise data caching and yes, definitely probably some gamers.

Exciting times we live in.

SSDs are coming. No, really.

Sandisk announced a new line of SSDs on Jan 8 (thanks for the tip ZDnet!) that take a step closer to the tipping point where regular, spinning hard disks no longer make sense for some people. People for whom pure capacity per dollar is less of a priority vs. power consumption, reliability, or speed.

A 240GB G3 series SSD drive from Sandisk will sell for $499, and will come in either 1.8" or 2.5" versions. Its main advantage is speed - 200MBs read and 140MBs write speeds - about 4 times faster than those of a 7200rpm desktop drive.

Put 5 of these babies on a fast RAID0 controller, and there you have 1.2TB array with a theoretical bandwidth of 1GBs, for under $3K. While that may be still expensive, the kicker is that it is fast enough to pull two streams of 10-bit 1080/60p, which normally requires a stack of 20 desktop or server drives in an array requiring lots of power and cooling.

We are getting to a point where uncompressed HD editing can be done on a laptop in a Starbucks shop.