Mushkin Ventura Ultra USB 3.0 120GB Flash Drive Capsule Review

The rise of USB 3.0 as a high speed interface for PCs and the increasing affordability of flash memory has led to some very interesting products. USB flash drives are a dime a dozen, but there is scope for manufacturers to differentiate themselves. We have already looked at the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX, which brought in a Phison controller into the flash driver market. Despite the presence of a USB 3.0 – SATA bridge chip, the unit supported all the important SSD functionalities such as TRIM and overprovisioning. Prior to the Corsair’s Voyager GTX introduction, Mushkin actually demonstrated and brought a SSD controller-based USB 3.0 flash drive to the market in the Ventura Ultra series.

Gallery: Mushkin Ventura Ultra USB 3.0 120GB and Atom USB 3.0 64GB Flash Drives

The Mushkin Ventura Ultra series is based on the Sandforce SF-2281 controller. SSDs based on that controller have been in the market for quite some time. The firmware is quite mature now. The bridge chip used in the drives is the ASMedia 1053E. Mushkin also tagged along a 64 GB Atom USB 3.0 drive (that we briefly saw at CES earlier this year) with the Ventura Ultra review sample. The rest of the review will present the DAS (direct-attached storage) benchmark numbers from our evaluation of the two devices, along with a few observations.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Evaluation of DAS units on Windows is done with the testbed outlined in the table below. For devices with USB 3.0 connections (such as the Ventura Ultra and Atom flash drives being considered today), we utilize the USB 3.0 port directly hanging off the PCH.

The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here. The list of DAS units used for comparison purposes is provided below:

• Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GB USB 3.0
• Mushkin Atom 64GB USB 3.0
• Corsair Voyager GTX 256GB USB 3.0
• LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB (SSD version, over USB 3.0)

Synthetic Benchmarks – ATTO and CrystalDiskMark

Mushkin claims read and write speeds of 445 MBps and 440 MBps respectively for the 120GB Ventura Ultra. These are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. The Atom version claims read and write speeds of 120 and 20 MBps. We don’t see anywhere close to those numbers in ATTO, though some of our other benchmarks (detailed further down) do come a bit close. Unfortunately, the numbers provided by ATTO are not directly applicable to most real-life scenarios. It must be noted that the SF-2281 drives tend to perform well with compressible data (as the controller does on-the-fly compression and de-duplication to reduce NAND wear). The data used by ATTO for testing can’t be configured and might turn out to be compressible, tending to favor the SandForce SF-2281 controller more.

Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBMushkin Atom 64GB

CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 14 MBps for the Ventura Ultra for 4K random accesses. The less said about the Atom drive here, the better it is. In any case, the Atom is not being marketed for its transfer rate capabilities.

Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBMushkin Atom 64GB

robocopy and PCMark 8 Storage Bench

Our testing methodology for DAS units also takes into consideration the usual use-case for such devices. The most common usage scenario is transfer of large amounts of photos and videos to and from the unit. The minor usage scenario is importing files directly off the DAS into a multimedia editing program such as Adobe Photoshop.

In order to tackle the first use-case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:

• Photos: 15.6 GB collection of 4320 photos (RAW as well as JPEGs) in 61 sub-folders
• Videos: 16.1 GB collection of 244 videos (MP4 as well as MOVs) in 6 sub-folders
• BR: 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure of the IDT Benchmark Blu-ray (the same that we use in our robocopy tests for NAS systems)

The 500 GB LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt wins all benchmark hands down. However, as we shall see further down, it is also the costliest of the lot. The form factor also doesn’t match up to those of a typical flash drive. Between the Ventura Ultra and the Voyager GTX, there isn’t much separation in the write benchmarks. However, the reads present a different story – the Ventura Ultra lags by quite a bit. We also see the 64GB Atom provide 100 MBps+ read speeds for some workloads.

For the second use-case, we take advantage of PC Mark 8’s storage bench. The storage workload involves games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to cherry-pick storage traces to run on a target drive. We chose the following traces.

• Adobe Photoshop (Light)
• Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Illustrator

Usually, PC Mark 8 reports time to complete the trace, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth figures which we present in our performance graphs. Note that the bandwidth number reported in the results don’t involve idle time compression. Results might appear low, but that is part of the workload characteristic. Note that the same testbed is being used for all DAS units. Therefore, comparing the numbers for each trace should be possible across different DAS units.

In these benchmarks, the Ventura Ultra and Voyager GTX are more evenly matched, trading honors depending on the workload. It must be remembered that the toss-up between the Ventura Ultra and the Voyager GTX is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison because of the difference in the capacities.

Concluding Remarks

Coming to the business end of the review, the Ventura Ultra keeps up Mushkin’s claims of being one of the fastest flash drives in the market. The icing on the cake is the presence of a real SSD controller in the form of the SandForce SF2281 inside.

The performance of the drive leaves us with no doubt that it would be a great portable OS drive, even though Mushkin doesn’t advertise it for that purpose. The Atom series, on the other hand, is nothing great when it comes to performance. However, the miniature size is the main selling point here.

Minor points of concern include Mushkin’s refusal to divulge the flash memory configuration being used (as these could potentially change in future production runs) and the inability to recognize and take actions on the drive based on S.M.A.R.T features such as TRIM. That said, it is not really clear whether TRIM on SF2281 drives is really worth the trouble. In any case, there is inherent over-provisioning in the drive and the typical flash drive use-case rarely fills up the drive enough to cause extensive performance degradation.

The pricing aspect is the final item on the table. The LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt is obviously costly because of the availability of dual interfaces (both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt). The Atom comes in as the cheapest of the lot (after all, it is a typical flash drive). The Ventura Ultra, on a per-GB basis, is definitely more attractive than the Corsair Voyager GTX. However, long-term performance consistency for heavy use-cases (not the typical flash drive usage scenario) may be in favor of the Corsair unit (thanks to TRIM support). Over-provisioning can be configured for the Voyager GTX also.

In terms of absolute pricing, the Mushkin Ventura Ultra is available for $70. The 64GB Atom drive retails for $29. A typical SF-2281-based 120GB SSD in a 2.5″ bus-powered USB 3.0 enclosure retails for around $90. The form factor of the Ventura Ultra, fortunately, doesn’t carry a premium. This makes it easy to recommend it to users looking for a flash drive that can take full advantage of USB 3.0 speeds.

Tegile Launches T3600 & T3700 All-Flash Arrays

Last week we expanded our enterprise storage coverage with flash arrays and today the coverage continues with Tegile’s announcement of the T3600 and T3700. To bring everyone up to the speed, let’s start with a brief introduction of the company. Tegile was founded in 2009 by Rohit Kshetrapal, Rajesh Nair, Justin Cheen and Alok Agrawal and operated in stealth mode until 2012. The founders share a history at Perfigo, which was a developer of packaged network access control solutions that was acquired by Cisco in 2004. As a result Tegile’s expertise lies in the networking and connectivity aspect of the array, and hence Tegile provides both hybrid and all-flash arrays.

SanDisk and Western Digital (i.e. HGST) are strategic investors in the company, which guarantees Tegile access to the latest SSDs at competitive prices. Currently all Tegile’s arrays use SAS SSDs, for which SanDisk and HGST both have extensive lineups, but as the industry moves towards PCIe Tegile will be making the transition as well. Tegile is already evaluating some of Fusion-io’s PCIe SSDs now that the company is under SanDisk, but there are no finalized plans for a product yet.

The T3600 and T3700 are additions to Tegile’s all-flash arrays and bring smaller capacity points to the lineup. The existing T3800 started at 48TB raw, but Tegile told me that many customers were looking for something around 10-20TB in capacity and the T3800 was too beefy (read: expensive) for that. The T3600 and T3700 have 9.6TB and 24TB of raw flash respectively, which can be extended by using expansion shelves.

The expansion shelves are basically just a bunch of drives that connect to the array and use its logic, but it should be kept in mind that the shelves are their own units and thus eat up rack space. 2U and 4U expansions are available with the T3600 and T3700 having support for either four 2U (ESF-10/25/50) or two 4U (ESF-145) expansions. The maximum effective capacity is achieved with two ESF-145 expansions that are 144TB each and a 5x multiplier from compression and de-duplication, which Tegile claims is the typical increase in usable capacity. Obviously, the actual multiplier depends on the stored data and some workloads are inherently more compressible than others, so the 5x multiplier is merely an ideal guideline.

The T3400 is different from the rest in the sense that it supports the HDD-based 72TB ES4000 expansion shelf, whereas the other T3000 series models don’t. The reason lies in the architecture as the T3400 utilizes a pool of very low latency SSDs (likely SLC-based) that are used for metadata handling. The way Tegile handles metadata is actually one of its core advantages because Tegile stores the host and meta data separately, which is essential for efficient data de-duplication and also prevents the metadata from fragmenting. The usage of lower latency SSDs in the T3400 makes sense because all the meta data IOs need to be offloaded from the HDDs, but since that is not a problem with the rest of the T3000 lineup, high density eMLC SSDs are used in other models. All drives in the array are Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) with AES-256 support.

On the connectivity side, all T3000 series models have 14 1Gbps Ethernet ports with two of them dedicated to management. Additional connectivity options include dual-port 4/8 Fibre-Channel, 10Gbps Ethernet and quad-port 1Gbps Ethernet. Protocol support includes iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS and SMB protocols.

Along with the T3600 and T3700 releases, Tegile has updated its IntelliFlash OS to 3.0. The provisioning process has been streamlined and the provisioning profiles have been enhanced. The idea behind the provisioning profiles is to give IT administrators an easy way to set up provisioning based on the workload because not all IT administrators necessarily understand the complex storage architectures and what is the optimal provisioning for their workload.

Tegile is also releasing cloud-based IntelliCare customer support, which automatically collects various data points from the array and sends them to Tegile’s servers for analysis. The analysis allows Tegile to inform the customer about any potential component failures or other issues, and what’s interesting is that Tegile customers can view metrics of another customer’s Tegile array. Hence IT administrators can compare their array against other Tegile arrays in the wild and can see if there are any settings that could be toggled for more optimized performance.

The T3600 and T3700 are both available now and start at $220,000 (~$23/GB) and $300,000 ($12.50/GB) respectively.

Skyera Releases skyHawk FS All-Flash Array: Up to 136TB of NAND in 1U

Our enterprise storage coverage has mainly been focused on individual enterprise SSDs from the likes of Intel and Micron, but there’s a lot of interesting action in the storage array space. I met with most of the big names in the array business at Flash Memory Summit this year, so with a better understanding of the market and with the right contacts, I think it’s logical that we expand our enterprise storage content to cover arrays as well.

Since we haven’t covered storage arrays or the companies involved in the past, I’ll start with a brief introduction of Skyera. While Skyera is a relatively new company, the company is filled with experience and knowledge of storage and non-volatile memory industries. The founders of Skyera, Radoslav Danilak and Rod Mullendore, both worked at SandForce before founding Skyera in 2010. Mr. Danilak was actually the co-founder and CTO of SandForce, whereas Mr. Mullendore served as the Chief Hardware Architect. 

While Mr. Danilak and Mr. Mullendore bring a lot of system-level hardware design knowledge to the company, what really separates Skyera from the rest is the NAND expertise. This is especially thanks to the CEO, Frankie Roohparvar, who was one of the founders of Micron Quantum Technologies in the early 90s. Micron Quantum Technologies was a manufacturer of NOR flash that was then acquired by Micron and basically formed the foundation of Micron’s NAND business. Before joining Skyera in 2012, Mr. Roohparvar served at Micron for 13 years with his most recent position being the Vice President and General Manager of the OEM Division of Micron’s NAND Solutions Group. 

Skyera’s approach to flash array design is to start from the lowest level, i.e. the NAND silicon. Obviously the company doesn’t manufacture its own NAND but Micron, Toshiba, and SK Hynix are all investors in the company, which ensures a steady supply of NAND and also gives Skyera much deeper access to NAND than what typical customers get. What this means is that Skyera can run its own validation and ‘trimming’ (optimizing the read/write parameters etc.) process on the NAND to boost the endurance. The benefit is lower cost because Skyera’s own process can increase the endurance of normal MLC NAND from ~3,000 P/E cycles to over 30,000 P/E cycles (or so I was told), whereas most companies are limited to buying off-the-shelf NAND, which either means cheap but low endurance cMLC or expensive eMLC. 

With the brief introduction of Skyera out of the way, let’s focus on the skyHawk FS. It’s offered in raw capacities of 16, 32, 68 and 136TB with all models utilizing the same 1U form factor. The final usable capacity depends on the provisioning of the array as well as the compressibility of the data since the skyHawk FS does compression in hardware (similar to what SandForce does). For comparison, Pure Storage, which is one of the leading all-flash array suppliers, only offers up to 11TB in 2U form factor, so Skyera has an enormous advantage in terms of density.  

EDIT: Skyera doesn’t actually do de-duplication like I initially said, so sorry for the mix up. The compression is still there, though.

The density advantage comes from Skyera’s NAND expertise because the company builds its own drives (or blades as they are usually called) and can utilize the latest NAND lithographies available. While Skyera didn’t specify the exact NAND that is used in the skyHawk FS due to the fact that there are multiple suppliers, I was told that the die capacity is 128Gbit and Micron’s 16nm is one of the processes that is used. For the record, Crucial’s MX100 and Micron’s M600 are the only other products that I know of that use 16nm NAND right now and I know for sure that 16nm isn’t available to the public in volume yet, so Skyera has an enormous advantage thanks to the close relations with the NAND manufacturers.

Software wise the skyHawk FS uses Skyera’s own SEoS that has been designed solely for NAND. The vertically integrated business model allows Skyera to build the whole software stack around NAND, which enables a more global and adaptive Flash Translation Layer (FTL) for instance (i.e. the FTL can be managed at the system level instead of drive level). The design also allows the load to be split between the master controllers and the individual controllers in the blades for higher and more efficient performance, whereas with third party drives the drives would be doing their own management and the global/host management would be left for the master controller, resulting in a less efficient design. 

In terms of performance, Skyera is rating the skyHawk FS at 2.4GB/s throughput and 400K IOPS with microsecond latencies, but unfortunately the IO sizes and queue depth are unspecified, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions or comparisons from the numbers. The skyHawk FS has three 10Gbit Ethernet ports for connectivity and both iSCSI and NFS v3 protocols are supported. The skyHawk FS carries a 3-year warranty with no write endurance limitation, which is yet another advantage of Skyera’s NAND knowhow. 

The skyHawk FS is available immediately and is priced at $2.99 per raw gigabyte (i.e. with compression the real cost per gigabyte will come down).

Since this was our first flash array news post, I’d like to hear your feedback in the comments below. Would you like to see more content like this from us in the future? And if so, are there any specific topics or companies that you would like us to cover? The enterprise storage space is rather complex and there are a lot of companies involved, but we want to do our best to cover it (even in a limited matter) in the future, so let us know your thoughts.