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VIA, VT6421, PCI, Sata, Controller, Hardware, BSD, Unix, Linux, Slackware
We'd like to share an experience about PCI Sata controllers with VIA VT6421 chipset and solid state drives. This PCI cards support software raid. You can set raid with jumpers on the card. We have not tested this system with a Windows or another operating system. The test consist on BSD Unix.
We've tested this card on both FreeBSD 8.0 and Slackware Linux 13. To be honest, the card alone is awfull. It gives so much read/write errors on both BSD Unix and Linux.
The card detected both the HDD and SSD. The dmesg output includes the drive information. However, operating system don't see slices. Yes, you see the main drive on /dev, but you can't see the slices for even fdisk the drive. At least, we couldn't get succeed.
We don't hear but of couse somebody might use this system without any problem before, however we couldn't.
We do not suggest this VIA sata controller to Unix and Linux users. If you have an SSD, do not get close.
We have bought 16 GB BigBoy (Samsung Chips) Slim MLC SSD last week. In physical size, it's really so slim, thin, small. It's about 1 inch in size. The size advantage of solid state drives really matters.
What about the performance?
First of all, we didn't test the drive with for various factors. We only did simple copy and read tests.
The platform is FreeBSD unix. We formatted the SSD as UFS file system. The motherboard supports Sata 1. So the results are based on Sata 1 only.
We wrote a shell script, that copies a 35 byte file 10.000 times and then randomly reads this files.
We use a Seagate 320 GB 7200 RPM HDD to compare with our SSD.
The results:
SSD:
Write: 44.8106 seconds
Read: 1.9424 seconds
HDD:
Write: 49.6177 seconds
Read: 2.7077 seconds
We see that, this SSD is a little better than the HDD we use. There is no big difference for this models. However, we have to say that, we have tested the drives with a simple script which we coded ourselve, and the connection was Sata 1. Of course you can get different result with different platforms.
We will use this SSD in one of our servers for operating system or database (e.g. mysql). We didn't decide yet. We will do some more tests.
In near future, we will buy and test other SSD models and share the results in SSDAge.com