NVMe SSD designed for audiophiles

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On 5/9/2021 at 3:03 PM, badK said:

I figured that using a storage layer that is isolated by a physically separate PS (actually four of them), and fibre cables for data, I would be about as isolated as I could get.  Has anyone else used FC-based storage?  These are available on ebay for pennies, relatively speaking.  Prices this morning like $149 for a 24 drive array with FC-to-SATA controller.

 

Fibre channel has been dirt cheap for awhile. Nowadays the good NICs are "converged" ie. they can support FC or IB or Ethernet and then there's FCoE etc.

 

The latest greatest technology is NVME over Ethernet (NVMEoE) and that's where 100 Gbe starts making more broad sense. Modern NICs support these protocols on controller.

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On 6/15/2021 at 9:05 PM, davide256 said:

Running OS in RAM helps reduce I/O bottleneck if you do DSD512 upsampling, I was getting pauses with OS on disk

Linux generally runs in RAM, at least the kernel does. Ive booted Ubuntu over the network eg PXE or iSCSI and have the network down (so no "disk access") ... it runs happily along until you try to run a new program etc. Given generous RAM, HQPE for example, only accesses disc to do logging, as all music data is otherwise mounted via SMB3.

 

Windows ... that's another story

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On 4/6/2022 at 3:34 PM, MarcelNL said:

Do you plan to use copper? (I hope so as it works magically when compared to aluminium somehow)

 

 

This technology NVME-oF uses glass! It is insane.

 

https://www.snia.org/geekout/nvme-of

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20 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

 

I do not understand that at all.

The new technology for high performance NVME NAS has the CPU talk directly to the NAS using the NVME protocol ... but over Ethernet.

 

The speed of the new networks approaches the memory bandwidth of the CPU. These networks are often fiberoptic, hence glass. So the NVME drive is mounted, and presents itself over the network.

 

Needless to say, over glass networks, the electrical activity of the NVME drive is entirely isolated from the CPU.

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On 6/8/2022 at 5:23 AM, yamamoto2002 said:

 

IIRC I/O port of current gen NVMEoF Ethernet SSD is copper based: a protocol converter on the SSD speaks RDMA UDP protocol over its 25Gbe copper ethernet interconnect and Copper to Optical Media converter is needed to convert it to fibre optic. In the near future, I hope it will be replaced with direct silicon photonics optical protocol converter (for lower power consumption).

 Source: https://www.servethehome.com/marvell-88ss5000-nvmeof-ssd-controller-shown-with-toshiba-bics/

 

In the photo, there are two SFP28 ports. most certainly it is for redundancy like SAS drives

 

Nice, I think the more common situation will be a specialized server box which has an array of NVME SSDs, 

so: https://www.servethehome.com/ingrasys-es2000-for-kioxia-em6-nvme-of-ssds-at-sc21/

and: https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/storage/powermax/powermax-2000-all-flash-storage-array.htm

and: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/nvme

 

and you can build one on Linux using an NVME array controller along with a 100Gbe NIC etc

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21 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said:

One concern is power consumption and need for high CFM fan ... Behold the counter rotating fan of Ingrasys enclosure, its sound is like a jet engine. I have a enterprise SAS12G SSD and it quickly becomes 70 ℃ and thermal shutdown with no airflow.

Ah yes but with a 100Gbe single mode fiber, the noisy box is in my basement and thoroughly isolated from my audio areas! The latency and access are essentially the same as for an SSD attached to my PCIe bus! RDMA/ROCE all the way!