OCZ's Fastest SSD, The IBIS and HSDL Interface Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 29, 2010 12:01 AM ESTThe Vision
I spoke with OCZ’s CEO Ryan Petersen and he outlined his vision for me. He wants HSDL and associated controllers to be present on motherboards. Instead of using PCIe SSDs, you’ll have HSDL connectors that can give you the bandwidth of PCIe. Instead of being limited to 3Gbps or 6Gbps as is the case with SATA/SAS today you get gobs of bandwidth. We’re talking 2GB/s of bandwidth per drive (1GB/s up and 1GB/s down) on a PCIe 2.0 motherboard. To feed that sort of bandwidth all OCZ has to do is RAID more SSD controllers internal to each drive (or move to faster drive controllers). Eventually, if HSDL takes off, controller makers wouldn’t have to target SATA they could simply build native PCIe controllers. It’d shave off some component cost and some latency.
You can even have a multi-port IBIS drive
The real win for HSDL appears to be the high end workstation or server markets. The single port HSDL/IBIS solution is interesting for those who want a lot of performance in a single drive, but honestly you could roll your own with a RAID controller and four SandForce drives for less money. The potential is once you start designing systems with multiple IBIS drives. With four of these drives you should be able to push multiple gigabytes per second of data which is just unheard of in something that’s still relatively attainable.
The Test
Note our AnandTech Storage Bench doesn't always play well with RAIDed drives and thus we weren't able to run it on the IBIS.
| CPU | Intel Core i7 975 running at 3.33GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset: | Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
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mroos - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
What PCI device do these IBISes provide? Is it something standard like AHCI that has drivers for every OS, or something proprietary that needs new driver written and integrated into all relevant OS-es?mroos - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
OK, it looks like the interface to host is SiI 3124. This is widely supported sata HBA and has drivers for most operating systems.But SiI3124 is just SATA host controller - no RAID. So the RAID must be done host side, or sofRAID in other words. It also means Linux should see 4 distinct SSD devices.
paralou - Saturday, April 9, 2011 - link
Hello,I don't remember if i already posted my question, sorry !
But in installed one IBIS 160GB using the following configurated computer:
ASUS P6T WS Pro (latest BIOS & drivers)
Intel i7 Core 965 Extreme 3.2GHz
Kingston DDR3 1600MHz - 12GB
nVIDIA Quadro FX4800 grphics card
2 Seagate SAS 450GB
Microsoft Windows 7 Pro
After installing Win7 without problems, i installed antivirus BitDefender, several app's (including Adobe package and Microsoft Office Pro), configured Updates NOT AUTOMATIC !
When i stopped my computer, system started downloading 92 Upgrades (without my permission) ?
When i restarted..Crash error 0x80070002
Impossible to restor (i made an image system, but day before !)
Reinstalled, and while i was typing the Key codes for the Microsoft Vision Pro ..
An other crash ! Same problem !
My opinion, about the IBIS HSDL box, it's a very poor assembly design!
Impossible to connec the supply connector on it, and i must dismantle the front plater to have access to the supply connector !
Now, i wonder if i have to follow OCZ's advice about the BIOS configuration?
They are saying:
" You must set you BIOS to use "S1 Sleep Mode" for proper operation.
Using S3 or AUTO may cause instability ".
And what about the internal HDD's ?
Is there any member who already installed such IBIS and use it regularely.
If the answer is Yes (?) can you please tell me how you configured your system ?
Regards,
Paralou
MySchizoBuddy - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
OCZ doesn't have PCIe x16 option like FusionIO ioDrive Octal which takes the reads to 6GB/s