SmartRAID 4300 series

[mikefromspace]

This one hit my inbox like a sledgehammer. I'm just too interested to not see what this really means, so give me your 'second' opinion. Here's the excerpt;

At its heart, the SmartRAID 4300 series (datasheet linked) offers a restructured approach to storage acceleration. Rather than routing all data through a single PCIe host slot, the system separates the Smart Storage software hosted on the CPU from the RAID hardware offload engine. This configuration supports up to 32 x 4 NVMe SSD endpoints directly connected to the CPU, enabling full bandwidth use and eliminating the constraints associated with fixed PCIe host interfaces.

The series includes low-profile, 16-lane PCIe Gen 4 adapters, such as the SmartRAID 4308P-32a, which support RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50. Performance metrics from internal benchmarks show throughput of up to 300 GBps for sequential reads and 196 GBps for sequential writes under Linux configurations. Random IOPS performance peaks at 27.3 million for reads and 22.4 million for writes in optimal RAID0 configurations. RAID rebuild operations are similarly accelerated, achieving up to 5.6 million IOPS and 32 GBps for sequential read operations under RAID5.

[mikefromspace]

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/microchip-unveils-bottleneck-busting-raid-storage-accelerator-cards/?user_mcid=669e653fd2

[twin_savage]

While I'm sure this accelerator isn't playing as fast and loose with your data as something like graid's, I can't help but think there would still be issues during a power interruption since it does not have a cache super capacitor. Also the lack of raid 6 isn't great since that makes bit rot recovery much more difficult.

 

All that being said I think this does support an important niche in the storage market that will only grow as storage gets faster and we need accelerators for it.

 

An unintended niche for this might be for Windows users, it looks like it can make bootable NVMe raid volumes which haven't been very accessible for Windows users.