a bit of back story for you before we jump into an interview with mark noland at kingston technology the server we use here at the studio has been low on space for some time i've actually had to delete things in order to make room for the shows each week it's an old server but it still runs great a bit on the loud side with those dell cooling fans but it runs well so there's no reason to replace it yet the storage however could use an upgrade since transitioning our editing to 4k last fall it's become obvious that not only is the storage array too small but the drives aren't fast enough either so after some research i picked up kingston data center ssds they've got ecc to protect against data corruption and they're meant for business use in the data center now my data center as you can this is it i've got a single old dell r510 server but what we'll cover today is completely scalable i don't want to give you the wrong impression whether you're a very small business like myself even a home server or a web host or large enterprise with many servers the point is that these competitively priced enterprise ssds from kingston can really improve your server's performance now for my use here at category 5 tv i went with the dc 500rs because they're optimized for read intensive application that should do really well for our video editing of course i also use the server for general data storage to hold past seasons of videos plus i run a few virtual machines on there to run our internal infrastructure so needless to say kingston's dc 500rs are going to be ideal not just for my general use but the bursts of sudden read speed i need when loading big video files they've also got dc500ms as well and if you need higher write speed those will fit the bill being a really great big bang for the buck all round ssd for servers i wanted to know how much of a difference the upgrade actually made so i set up a comparison with the hopes of making it as close of a one to one as possible so i chose a raid 5 with 4 disks each and before i ran the tests i updated the raid controller firmware while it is an old server i thought it would be best to make sure everything is as up to date as possible from there along with some helpful advice from kingston's fio expert matt eaton i wrote a benchmark script that i could run against both my original spinning drives and the new kingston ssds giving me a pretty good view of how the performance compares the code's on my github page and the link is in the video description below huge thanks to matt for all of his help and also dave leung for among other things helping connect me with the right people at kingston i did a fair amount of preconditioning on the drives though time was of a factor here as well and since the spinners were taking an unreal amount of time to precondition i did cut that process short it should be noted too that the drives are different capacities so this is by no means apples to apples but in a real world environment such as ours here at the studio i'm happy just to know that there's a perceptible improvement with reasonably accurate numbers to back that up i brought the server nearly to its knees the file tests were brutal on these old spinner drives but they completed way faster on the ssds so i grabbed some 2.5 to 3.5 inch adapters that'll match up nicely with the server's backplane since the dell trays only support 3.5 inch drives firing up the server with the ssds and all appears to work great but all the drives are flashing in amber light i asked mark from kingston if this was a concern well uh with dell where did you get the drive sled wait a minute so you're telling me these fancy expensive drive adapters or what's causing this it's the drive sled the drive set has a chipset on it all right let's try a different approach then commander muff posted thing 1830990 to thingiverse which looks promising i've got the link in the description below let's give it a shot [Music] oh success the kingston dc 500s connected directly to the backplane using 3d printed adapters did the trick now i'd like to briefly digress because this is another testament to the cost savings of owning a 3d printer now i paid sixteen dollars each for these adapters the ones i printed myself these worked better and now while i used expensive pla plus filament which cost forty dollars per kilogram each tray adapter which is 14 grams uh price that prices it at only 56 cents each so the material cost being 56 cents i saved 15.44 per tray adapter that's a grand total of 123.52 cents saved to print eight adapters myself if i did that just two more times i've already offset the upfront expense of buying my 3d printer in savings alone anyway back to our subject but first a quick word from our sponsors when we return mark nolan joins us from kingston to make sense of the file results and talk about how business users can further improve the performance of the data center stick around i've run the fio tests on all the drives and i've passed the numbers on to the team at kingston so they can help make sense of the test results and here's what those numbers look like so in the middle column there i've got the four dell constellation es drives those have the sas interface running at 7200 rpm and i've configured them in a raid 5. you can see the iops input output per second is very very poor by contrast to the ssds in the far right column those are the dc 500rs from kingston and those again are configured in the same way a raid 5 with four drives however these ones are one terabyte drives versus the spinning drives that are two terabytes each not apples to apples but you can see clearly that the speed is significantly improved on the ssds mark noland is a field application engineer from kingston technology mark thanks for taking the time to speak with me howdy how are you today great tell us a little bit about what it is that you do at kingston uh so i'm my title is field applications engineer uh but i interface a lot with uh clients and users at data centers um i also you know in my background i i used to work for autodesk uh in the film and video industry um and dealt with like sort of everything from the desktop application back to the data center you know uh so if you if you break a bottleneck at the desktop you know then your next bottleneck is the network and once you break that then your bottleneck is on the server and so um just basically trying to troubleshoot and and break bottlenecks whether it's you know uh databases or you know uh 8k video editing systems uh things like that they all need big fast data going through pipes don't i know it don't i know it oh yeah so you've seen that's quite a setup you got there cheers yeah well and you've seen our file numbers from our test today um and i i do realize those numbers are slightly arbitrary um however what i did is i ran the same test against the same scenario on our old spinning drives as i did on dc500rs so just looking at those numbers can you help us to make sense of what's what's actually happening there uh okay yeah so uh you know first of all both you know both the ssds and the hard drives are connected to the sata bus right same server all the hardware is the same just the drives have changed yeah the sata bus is one of the older um connection methods in in this in the computer uh and and it has uh you know a few uh weaknesses and that uh sort of you can only be reading or writing to it at any one time uh but you know with raid controllers and that they've gotten really good at being able to optimize that uh the best way possible so then you come down to the raw you know interface differences between a hard drive spinning disk and ssds and you know s's ssds have been modified you know it's a a solid-state disk it's basically you've got computer memory nand that is being uh routed to speak uh disk language right and so uh in a way you're sort of uh hobbling the the uh fast nand that's in there by making it go through the uh uh sata interface but uh it has to pretend that it is uh it has to like at least translate to speak disc language so when you've got like uh the old school heart spinning discard drives um you know they're they're pretty good at doing sequential stuff uh random they start choking and when it comes to iops they really have a hard time keeping up with the memory you can see you know which parts are uh in the difference between your test scores you can see which parts are you know low because of the spinning disc itself and ones that you know uh uh are like the uh nand on an ssd is actually able to you know still put pretty good uh bandwidth through so like in your in your uh read and write performance um you know the ssds are anywhere between like on the read maybe four times faster than uh the fastest rate of hard drives that you have going right um this is also you're doing raid five so there's a little bit of overhead with disk management so if you did raid zero on both the ssds i need redundancy yeah yeah yeah you have no redundancy but if you do raid zero you know then you can see raw bandwidth sure uh happening right yeah uh but and and that that's when ssds would even take a step above you know sad ssds would be even faster uh without that redundancy happening because there's a certain amount of uh overhead that's happening to to do that but even with your raid 5 setup you're still looking at about three times faster for ssds than hard drives uh on uh on a re on a right and four times faster on the read uh typically but the the one sort of secret place that it ends up being much much faster is uh in the latency so that's like the time between when i click and submit a request to the time that uh it actually starts happening right um if if it's like a random io event it might be you know when your drives are warmed up and everything it might be uh like 0.8 milliseconds to 1.2 milliseconds depending uh whereas on the ssd it's going to be microseconds so even if it's 20 microseconds uh and you have a rate of four drives if you say that your average latency per drive was one millisecond on a hard drive and it's like 20 microseconds on the ssd then uh you haven't even gotten to a microsecond by the time you add up that latency across the four drives the latency is a big difference and then the quality of service so one of the things that we really tested the data center the dc 500 and 450 and dc 1000 drives they're they're tested extensively for you know quality of service that's the main the main thing you're looking for if you're putting them into a data center like tier two cloud something like that uh you want a quality of service where uh you know a consumer ssd might peak deliver super performance for a short period of time and if you're only transferring a couple gigs at a time that's what you want it's on your laptop right you know you're trying to get things on and off really quick that's awesome but if you're if you're running a drive you know 24 7 with a database with for online transactions uh you're writing to it and reading from it like constantly and you you don't want to see big spikes up or down in the performance you want to see like a really flat line in that performance and and you'll see that with like a hard drive you know uh it'll spike up really fast initially because it's got a dram cat anytime you're transferring a video file or something it's like fast and then and then it'll plummet down to right 200 megabytes per second and then it goes 30 megabytes yes and you're like what happened yeah uh and the problem is at a certain point you're running out of cash or something like that so in that uh you know in in your fio script uh one of the important things to do if you're wanting to test for data center use is to do that uh warm up on the drive to have it burned in so that uh it's not just like fresh out of the box i just installed it and all the sectors are blank and and you know like uh because it's not having to have any overhead of managing uh data on the drive i would see what the drives in use so is that is that kind of the key difference between the consumer ssds that i have in my laptop in my home computers versus these data center drives yeah that and you might see over provisioning differences um like our uh dc uh drives um number one they have a decent amount of uh dram cash on them uh where a lot of consumer drives might have uh a pseudo slc where they take tlc or qlc memory and program it as slc so rather than you know they might take a sector a section of the drive and and say this is going to be programmed as slc so i'm only going to store one bit of data in this cell instead of the three or four like if it's uh tlc you're storing three bits of data uh or bytes and and uh and qlc you're storing four so you've got much more data that's being stored there uh you know we had mlc uh but then it was tlc and uh qlc and you know we're we're trying to plan more more bits into uh uh the more cells uh and as you do that it gets you know it takes a little longer to program uh all those uh bytes and bits into uh the different cells so if you use the pseudo cache of slc which we do on a few drives as well and consumer uh but uh you're it the reason you do it is it's much less expensive than using dram and so uh on our on our data center drives there they all have like a nice big dram cache on them that's one of the big oh okay and so uh that that combined with uh the over provisioning that is on uh our data center drives allows for uh as well as tweaks in the firmware it allows for really a high level of quality of service so you don't see big spikes way up and then weight down and and going you know right where you're at the max performance of the bus down to zero back to the middle and are you when you say when you say over provisioning are you talking about io now over provisioning is where if i have like if you see uh an ssd that has say it has 940 or 960 gigs yeah uh of 960 gig capacities really common right yeah that that's a terabyte of nand that's on there and it has over provisioning of uh three to five percent for the data itself so the storage yeah okay and so when when you see a drive that says one terabyte uh lots of times that's still the same amount of nand as if you bought a 960 but the the thing you'll notice is like on a consumer drive if you get up to being 90 full on one that's not over provisioned you'll start you'll see the performance also start to tank whereas if you have one that if you have the you know the 960 gig drive it can be 90 full and you'll still be riding at the same speed as when it was empty uh you know you it well i won't say when it was empty because one of the things we do that uh preconditioning right that's part of our script that we we're working on there um that preconditioning basically make sure that the drives sort of dirtied up and and uh is doing real workload type stuff so you guys because you can test anything out of the box and it might look spectacular but then when you put it into real use uh throw it into a data center and you know weak into being used you're like this is not performing the way it did you know i threw these consumer drives in there and they were great and now they uh are terrible yeah um oh i see that yeah i've seen that on desktop drives and things like that yeah when they get warmed up and dirty and make sense they they're under real world working conditions and not just running a benchmark and now my iops on the and you mentioned iops maybe i could get you to briefly explain what that means to us um but it is through the roof higher uh on the ssds what is that what does that tell us so uh part of that is it's because of it's physics right so on the ssd it's science we're talking about physics the hard drive is actually relying uh for the iops it actually has that needle that moves back and forth with the reader physical drives yeah the the spinning drives and so it actually has to in order to read a point it has to physically move to somewhere find that read it uh verify it and then move to the next point find it read it and verify it so uh just because of the way physics and thermodynamics work the drive can't spin any faster they you know hard drives are really really great for what they do and that you get really big hard drives they're pretty durable uh but physics can't take them any farther because and and so when you go over to an ssd uh you're just everything's uh done through solid state you're not moving anything except electrons and so uh you know you're you you have like your seek times go down by a thousand fold uh and that's why you'll see what the iops difference um the random read which was your best on the hard drives random read of 673 iops whereas the random read on the raid of dc 500r was 121 000 iops so 180 times the speed yeah it's it's just a little faster a little bit that's amazing so now we understand now so i've jumped from going from the spinning drives to the ssds now my bottleneck is sata the the connection so that 121 000 iops with that if you went to now you go to pcie based drives pcie gen 3 nvme type drives so either m.2 or u.2 u.2 is more friendly to a data center because it is in that two and a half inch form factor rather than the gum stick form factor which is a little difficult to manage there's a few people that have uh adapters and things like that to put lots of m.2s into servers but um you know i think the the u.2 and the ruler are going to be much more common uh going forward for putting in lots of you know like 24 or more uh u.2 drives uh like nvme ssds into a server uh but now you're talking like the iops go up another factor right um so like an nvme drive because it's not limited to uh by the sata bus uh it uh is limited by the pcie bus so um you know you go to gen four and that's twice as fast as gen three so you know potentially twice as fast i haven't seen any models where like it is twice as fast but you know significantly gen 4 demos that i've seen are significantly faster like uh you know you're talking off of by 16 uh i think uh the fastest demo i've seen so far is about 25 gigabytes per second off of one device on one gen 4 bytes per second wow and and i don't know how scalable that is currently but that was when gen 4 was still experimental which it's a little experimental i think the amd one is is looking really good but uh i'll call it kind of experimental until intel and amd both have their gen 4 out and all of the enterprise servers are shipping with gen 4 pcie because at this point it's a really cool gamer box or a really high-end a really high-end workstation you know like it uh nvidia's got a lot of cool demos with four gpus on an amd proc with uh you know lots of nvme uh uh drives connected to it and they're doing some really neat demos and as is amd with their their gpus but all that right now seems it it's like if i have to go drop five to 20 grand on a workstation um i i'm gonna wait until it's uh somebody else uh works out all the wrinkles in that experiment so thinking about my use case so i obviously work here in a studio so i'm doing a lot of video production maybe some of our viewers are working in an office environment where they've got similar scenarios where hey we've got to replace the drives in an older server or maybe it's not even that old but they're they're not necessarily replacing an entire server they just want to put ssds in instead of the spinning drives because they're kind of the way to go right now and we're certainly seeing a big performance boost here um is there you know where where is the performance gain so for me it's it's in editing real-time 4k video it's it's brilliant on the on the dc 500rs um where where is the the average business consumer i.t department going to find gains by upgrading the servers to ssd well i i think client satisfaction and my uh dad's a dentist and my mom's a lawyer and and uh i've used to do some computer tech support for people in those communities and and you know like uh uh doctors and lawyers are notoriously cheap when it comes to you know like uh spending money on on systems like that but the systems also drive all of the uh all of the uh revenue in their business so it's really important for them to keep them updated and i think the thing that you get by going from hard drive to ssds on an upgrade of an older system you know you'll be able to ring at least two or three more years out of it if not more um you know you'll you you'll you always hit a bottleneck somewhere but rather than your system being the bottleneck it might be the os or the version of the software that you're using or something like that but uh you'll make something much more usable have you ever taken an old hard drive ss or a whole old hard drive laptop and put an ssd in it and you know it's like all sudden it's like why was i going to get rid of this thing it's so fast exactly it like breathes new life into an old system and that's exactly what this has done for our server and i and as you're talking about bottlenecks i'm thinking okay well sata is six gig a second so i think my bottleneck actually mark is going to be my networking because i'm only on gig ethernet so yeah that's my bottleneck but being a very small business myself having gig ethernet and being able to edit video over one gig a second is is stellar it's superb um well the the trick you know for that like because my job was breaking those kind of bottlenecks uh previously is i would put a 10 gig uh on your server and have a switch that distributes it out to your gigabit clients and and until you get a 10 gig uh or desktop or something you could always go you know like uh do it gradually just like adding uh ssds to your uh uh legacy systems yeah uh that's a good idea just kind of upgrade the the networking as i go that's the next step yeah um what kind of longevity am i going to be looking at um for ssds i know like when ssds first came out so years ago um there were those of us who were hesitant and afraid to switch to ssd because the they weren't quite as reliable but that has completely changed over the past several years are we like what kind of lifespan do we expect from like your your data center drives uh so our data center drives we warrant them for five years uh yeah and then you know like the they have different um drive rights per day warranties as well so like the dc 500 that's a 0.3 drive right per day so if you have a four terabyte or a three three point uh was it 3.86 uh if you have a four essentially there's four terabytes in the end on there but if you have like a four terabyte drive or an eight terabyte drive of the r which is a read centric model you can get uh up to uh you can do uh 0.3 drive rights per day um uh the m version of that is 1.5 drive rights per day and if you think about that for a four terabyte drive that's a lot of writing yeah if you're riding uh you know like uh six terabytes a day uh you might be running facebook off of your uh server i don't know that's a lot of data to fill up and delete because that's it's not so much about um you know like if you're just collecting drives or collecting data on your drives that's what the r is all about right so the read centric one if i want to like have a database full of video and images and text files and spreadsheets and stuff that's going to live there forever the dc 500r is a really great drive because i'm just adding stuff to it all the time i'm not adding you know like a terabyte at a time and then calculating that data and deleting the whole thing and and putting in the answer that's another terabyte um you know that that's something like uh uh lamp where you've got you know apache server and and or an oltp server or you know some kind of online transaction thing where you know uh uh you're you're just grinding through the data like you know facebook where you're just adding new cat videos all the time and then deleting them as they get old right um you know uh most people don't do that like i i've got a a drobo uh server that i just add stuff to constantly so uh i actually had to unplug it because it's so loud because of all the hard drives i'm gonna put uh four four terabyte ssds in there perfect that'll make it quiet yeah yeah it's pretty quiet all of a sudden it's interesting you say that like because that's the other thing that we don't necessarily think about with the upgrade is this the silence of them the energy efficiency yeah i i have to say that ssds uh compared to hard drive energy efficiency hard drives are actually really good at when they're not being used shutting down like they've they've really gotten good at being energy efficient uh and and i don't think that anybody's replacing hard drives with like well they have that that's exactly what we are exactly replacing hard drugs but they have their places like if i want to store 40 uh terabytes of data that's just cold data that i'm not going to access all the time but i really i need for legal reasons or you know like to make me feel secure or it's my backup that's a perfect use for hard drives if you have data that you want to be able to read and work off of hard drives are terrible for that just because the latency and you know it's if you're one user and you are getting the data off the hard drives it's bad enough to have to wait for it but if you've got like 10 users or even you know three or four users that are all hitting that uh hard drive array at the same time you can start you know like hey you know like why why is everything slowing down so much it's like um you know you'll also see a lot better multi-user uh efficacy happening when uh when you go to uh ssds just because the the latency lots of great information i mean i'm i'm all kinds of thoughts going through my head i'm thinking about how some servers like you've got multiple users all connecting for samba shares and accessing files or even accessing things like their bookkeeping software simultaneously on a single spinning hard drive in a system or something that's like the the difference in the well if you think about the the uh vm language of spin-up uh a virtual machine yeah when you are coming off of uh sata drive there's still a little spin up time but it it's like a fraction of uh what the spin up time because it really is a spin up time off of hard drives uh and then if you go to nvme it's it's almost like it was in dram you know it's like because the nvme drives being the you know it's off the sata bus and onto the pcie bus it's one step closer to the processor mm-hmm and we can that's why like dram is the best because it's on the processor right sure even the you know i guess the cache and the processor is on the processor but it's also not connected to your uh display and and all that so dram is sort of the king and which we also make there's all these um kind of irrelevant almost benchmarks of people turning on their computer and how long does it take to boot and it's and it's it's kind of irrelevant in so many ways and it makes me think about those spinning those drives spinning up we have such a we have a tendency to look at okay when i click on something how quickly does it happen how quickly does that application come up and for me in this scenario how quickly am i able to open large video files in my editor and right that's like where yeah i'm not having to wait for for that that moment is just an instant moment for me i would do uh so i a lot of the i would create demos for when we go to trade shows like nib the broadcasters uh north american broadcaster show or ibc in amsterdam uh i'd create some demos with adobe and uh you know one of the things that we'd have to do there is like if we're editing 8k or you know 4k or 8k video you have to make sure that the clips are long enough to blow out any dram that you have you know because if you know like if i'm editing and it's really small files they could all just live in dram or you know and i wouldn't know the difference you know it's like it could be coming off a hard drive but the first time i read it it's really slow but after that it's nice and fast uh because the if the files are tiny but if you are trying to pull like 4k still frames rather than an avi or a quick time uh you know that because the avr quicktime might be able to be stored in if you have 64 or 128 gigs of memory in your system right you might be able to store most of the video there but you don't really see the performance of the ssds until you have something that sort of outmatches the amount of dram that you have available to you mark if i may change directions just a as we approach closing our interview off one of the things as a business user that are that's really important to me is knowing that i can get support when i need it and throughout the course of this process in upgrading my server one of the things that really stands out to me is the fact that your team was there for me every step of the way is that is that pretty typical of kingston uh before i worked here i i didn't know that much about kingston i've worked here for a couple of years now and one of the things that really blew me away was the level of support so uh if you have a whether you have a problem with like a hyperx microphone like this or a headset or a keyboard or dram or uh an ssd if you call our support number we have people here in southern california in orange county that answer the phone there's not a data center somewhere around the world so during the it's going to be people in orange county if you call it three in the morning it's going to be people in england so we've got a really great support where if you have a real problem that they can't solve with uh you know the all their known database of issues uh it ends up to me in the engineering team for ssds if it goes to us um like within a half an hour it's in our inbox and and you've got like a whole engineering team from uh southern california to europe and and taiwan that are all dealing with it uh personally so fantastic i think that's one of the big differences like i i've had problems with uh drives from other manufacturers that i've worked at other manufacturers and and i couldn't get anybody to support me at the manufacturer that i worked at previously wow that's great and there's something to be said for good support absolutely now you mentioned the hyperx line of consumer products of course i've experienced it from the enterprise kind of level um is this you know level of support something that can be expected from consumers as well as business users well absolutely like i was saying like uh we've we've actually had people you know like with broken keyboards or you know it's a it's uh you know it's it's all one number every kingston uh you know has the hyperx brand for gaming but we also do you know high-end uh server products dram and ssds for the data center as well as you know consumer dram and consumer ssds and usb sticks from consumer ones to all the way to the encrypted ones with keypads on them um one of the other things that also surprised me coming from another uh company to kingston was uh the level of testing so a hundred percent of our data center uh ssds and and dram they're they're they're as every piece is tested uh they've you know like they've uh the server stuff goes through a more rigorous test uh but they simulate like three months worth of uh uh use on the d on the dram side and and uh uh like all the ssds are tested at uh in an oven basically while they're when they're being manufactured they're all tested at a high temperature to make sure that they are uh functioning in an optimal fashion fantastic big thanks to our guest mark noland who joined us from kingston today to talk about those drives really really exciting stuff hey um make sure you subscribe to us on youtube linuxtechshow.com is a great way to find us there also if you love what we do please become a patron patreon.com category5 but that's all the time we got so we're out of here take care we'll see you again next week [Applause] you