It’s good to know that there’s people in the world which like to do fun things. Company of friends decided to connect 24 SSDs to one PC. And they successfully did it. Moreover, the resulting experimental system was lightning-fast.
24 Samsung SSD Drives in One PC
In less than one day guys assembled powerful PCs based on two 3.2-GHz Quad-core CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775, motherboard Intel Skulltrail D5400XS, 4GB of RAM FB-DIMM DDR2-800, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 video cards. But the key feature of computer is disk subsystem: twenty four 256GB Samsung SSD drives with total capacity of 6 terabytes. To organize the drives massive enthusiasts used RAID-controllers Adaptec Series 5 and Areca 1680ix-24.
One of the most difficult steps was finding of the optimal configuration of SSD drives. After a series of experiments and errors had been found the best option – 10 drives connected to the controller Areca, 8 to the controller Adaptec, and the remaining 6 directly to the SATA-ports of the motherboard. In this approach fantastic performance was achieved – serial read/write speed exceeded 2GB/s. But to obtain such a result experimentalists had to disconnect one of the video cards because the computer hadn’t enough power to initialize the Areca controller. In addition they had to unplug all optical drives to free ports. Power supply to this unique system was provided by two kilowatt Corsair HX1000W units.
Let’s note some main characteristics of assembled PC:
* The speed of reading from the SSD with a serial access: 2121.29MB/s (measured using IOMeter);
* Writing speed with serial access: 2000.195MB/s (measured using IOMeter);
* Loading of all Microsoft Office applications in only 0.5 seconds;
* Loading of 53 applications in 18.09 seconds.
You can see whole process of assembling and testing in the this video:
