STEC Zeus IOPS

natermeister

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 26, 2005
Messages
463
Can you actually buy STEC's Zeus and Zeus IOPS SSDs? My guess is that unless you're an OEM, the answer is no. But what about re-brands? I think I remember hearing something roughly a year ago (such a long time in SSDs) about Simpletech (maybe) re-branding STEC's Mach8 SSD, which are one step below the Zeus series of drives.

If I were fabulously rich, I'd love a two drive (why not four?) RAID 0 of STEC's 500GB, dual port SAS, solid disks. Then maybe a Fusion-io card for booting slower applications...

That's not going to happen until I win the Powerball, but just for my own curiousity, I'd really like to know if you can buy these drives and what one goes for.
 
I can source STEC drives. The Mach8 SSD is actually actively rebranded by Dell and used in the Mini9. You can order it direct from Dell as a Mini 9 service part, if you like.

But no, you can't afford Zeus. Zeus IOPS is Nitro level pricing - ~$1,000 per gigabyte. So yes, the 73GB Zeus IOPS FC is about $74,000. The standard Zeus, I can source the 146GB FC for about $24K, and the 128GB SATA at around $16K.
 
Don't be. These are REAL Solid State devices, not consumer junk.
Key points of the Zeus are; SLC only, full non-disruptive ECC, 0-60C operating temperature, chip rail (stacked data lines,) and advanced proprietary controllers.
None of these features are present in anything you buy from Newegg. SLC, maybe. But that's it. STEC owns several patents on TSOP rails, so nobody else can do it. All consumer drives use the same off the shelf controllers. None of them have non-disruptive ECC.

The reason I don't push STEC though is the same reason I don't push consumer junk, and why I don't like STEC. These drives suffer from the same EPIC FAIL as consumer junk; a controller or chip fault is completely unrecoverable. Data on the drive is lost, period - you cannot recover it. For the money STEC wants, I can get same/better performance in a Nitro. The Nitro also comes with a 72 hour battery backup, fault tolerant controllers, and an internal mechanical backup disk - meaning that data on a Nitro is never unrecoverable.
 
You can't exactly buy a Fusion-io card at Newegg...

As for STEC drives being junk, I believe that just about every tier one server OEM would disagree as they all use them. I wish I had bought STEC back in January.
 
http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/ - probably on Newegg within the next 2-3 months at the latest.

Also, STEC is, when compared to what the same dollars will get you if you're looking for RAS, reliability, and resiliency. The reason people go to STEC is because they're the best of a very bad lot, and have the capacity. (IIRC, Curtis tops out at ~80GB with mechanical.) BiTMICRO beats STEC in the capacity segment, badly - 1.1TB of NVRAM in 1.6", 464GB in 1". Doesn't have the insane IOPS, but really, 500K per drive in an array is more than enough. Either way, you can't use either of them in a configuration where a drive going completely inaccessible results in dataloss.
For certain tasks, the fact is that STEC versus Curtis isn't even a competition. In fact, Curtis really doesn't have any competition. Nobody else currently markets an FC attach drive with that level of resilience.
 
That IOExtreme card isn't out yet, when it will come out isn't even known. Just because a company offers a low-end drive to consumers doesn't really make any difference if you ask me.

That's like saying Seagate FC and SAS (or Hitachi, or Fujistu, ect) drives are crap because they make consumer drives too. Although Seagate is trying hard at being crap with those .11 sequence drives.
 
You just said you can't buy a Fusion-IO at Newegg; well, that one will be on Newegg. Rest assured. It's no more expensive than X25s or Samsungs were at release.

And no. It's pointing out the technical flaws and limitations of the STEC drives. Please take the fanboi-gasms elsewhere. I've been dealing with solid state drives since 1996. The STEC drives are only suitable for use in RAID1/RAID10, same as BiTMICRO. Enterprise requires a certain level of resiliency and reliability, which STEC fails to meet. Any drive where a single TSOP failure can render a drive completely inaccessible and data permanently lost, it's not enterprise grade. Therefore, STEC, BiTMICRO, etcetera, is not truly enterprise grade and will not be any time soon.
 
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