Adaptec MaxIQ SSD

[nbarsotti]

Hello, I am wondering if anyone is running the Adaptec MaxIQ SSD product yet. It is basically an Intel x25-E 32gb drive that you add to any current Adaptec SAS raid card with new firmware and the RAID card starts to cache data on the SSD for increased performance. Its sounds like a greate idea, much like the Sun ZFS file system or the NetApp PAM II cards. Adaptec RAID 5805Z with MaxIQ or an LSI 9260-8i ?
If you have the MaxIQ in use or are considering it please respond with your comments.

[Aitor_Ibarra]

I considered it (I currently use Areca 1680ix, which are based on the same Intel / ARM cpu as the high end adaptec cards).

The main reason that I don't think it will be very good for me is that most of my "hot data" is actually windows boot volumes, as I run lots of virtual machines. MaxIQ doesn't (yet) do any deduping, so all it would do is cache the most commonly used blocks on the most commonly used boot volumes. If it had block level dedupe it would be much more interesting, as those boot volumes are going to have a lot of duplicated data. I think the way ZFS does this is something that perhaps Starwind should look at, as if Starwind could identify identical blocks and redirect them to admin-specified fast storage, the benefit would be much greater.

[Robert (staff)]

Aitor,

Thanks for the input. I will certainly relay this to our R&D team for consideration.