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Patriot crams 40 Torqx SSDs into one box: Project Artemis is born

by Tarinder Sandhu on 4 March 2010, 07:27

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There's always one company at CeBIT that brings a semi-crazed experiment to the show floor. This time around that company appears to be Patriot. Perhaps known to our readers and viewers as the purveyor of memory modules, it's jumped on the solid-state drive (SSD) bandwagon early with a range of Torqx-branded models.

A single 256GB Torqx is fast enough for most people's needs. Put two together in RAID0 and the system will fly along at over 400MB/s read. But what happens when you position 40 such drives in a single box? Watch the video and find out.


Fleshing out the clip, the Project Artemis setup houses a total of 10TB of storage over 40 drives. The chassis has 10 5.25in bay-adaptor enclosures that each hold four of the 256GB drives. Patriot uses five LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i controllers that can handle eight drives each. Power requirements of the box are such that an extra PSU is recruited to provide the juice.

The numbers are frightening and serve to show the intrinsic speed of NAND-based storage. Our calculations show that you wouldn't get much change out of £30,000 on a self-build basis and tapping into this kind of bandwidth would require some super-fast external interconnects, but it's nice to see the kind of speeds that the next generation of PC users may well be take for granted.

Patriot reckons it will build a 'significantly faster' SSD-laden box for COMPUTEX 2010. We wait with bated breath.

Full specs of the machine here.

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HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Pics of the inside of that case would have been nice. What mother board are they using to get 5x PCI-e 4x slots (I presume those MegaRAID cards require 4x slots)?

What are teh rest of the specs of this? Sorry if these questions have been answered in the video, I don't have sound here.
Seen a few of these “cram a load of SSDs in RAID” things now,
anyone done similar with ramdisks like acards?
Funkstar
What are teh rest of the specs of this? Sorry if these questions have been answered in the video, I don't have sound here.

They didn't say. Just 150k IOPs and 6GB/s transfer.

They did say that it would take 0.9s to rip a BD-DVD. That's bull, because it takes longer than 0.9s to read a BD-DVD. If you had already read it into the buffer, then 0.9s maybe, but not altogether.

PATRIOTS LIE!

/pun intended. I mean who likes Tom Brady anyway?
What I found really annoying is how he said “rip” a blu ray disk…ehem, excuse me? What Blu ray drive were you using to do that? EXACTLY!!! How about just saying a true great benefit of stuff loading faster…for example in video editing…where the files can be 1TB+ per clip (raw) …for the typical consumer? 4 x SSDs MAX is what you need to get the most benefit…. :)

LOL why did the other posts not show up until I submitted mine?
Funkstar
What are teh rest of the specs of this? Sorry if these questions have been answered in the video, I don't have sound here.

Specs are here: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=22745

anyone done similar with ramdisks like acards?

For overclocking world records, people use 5x iRams or 3x Acards, though iRams take a mobo slot each and Acards take 2 SATA connectors.

Incidentally, the overclocking community specify Ramdiscs as disks run in RAM, rather than Acards, which are hard drives made of ram with semi-permanent storage.