OCZ Technology Group is introducing a new SATA III-based solid-state drive (SSD) that delivers 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), 30,000 more IOPS than its predecessor. OCZ says the Deneva 2 line of SSDs is targeted at mission-critical enterprise applications, where fast reading and writing of data to and from storage is essential.
The Deneva 2 is a SATA III drive that provides peak throughput of 6 Gbps. SATA III is an industry standard for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment storage. The 80,000 IOPS performance on the Deneva 2 compares with 50,000 IOPS in the Deneva 1 line. OCZ provided performance comparisons for Deneva 2 along with those of competitors and stated that the STEC Mach 16 SATA II product delivered only 15,000 IOPS, the Intel 510 SATA II only 8,000 and the Micron C400 SATA III 50,000.
However, Jim Handy, an analyst with the research firm Objective Analysis, cautions that these benchmarks are not from an independent firm because there aren’t yet firms that do performance benchmarks on SSDs, as there are for, say, semiconductors. Nonetheless, Handy says, high-speed SSDs are in high demand, and his firm forecasts SSD unit shipments to grow by 83% annually in the near future as they become the preferred alternative to older, slower hard disk drives for storage.
"That’s quite a benchmark," Handy says of the 80,000 IOPS performance. "The SATA interface is usually thought of as being a client interface, and people who want to get the kinds of IOPS that you get out of that usually will use a Fibre Channel [FC] or SAS [serial-attached storage] interface. But because SATA III has really high-speed operation, apparently it’s quite capable of matching the speed of SAS and Fibre Channel.”
