The SupremeRAID SR-1010 from the Californian company GRAID offers much more performance than classic NVMe SSD RAID solutions. With the support of an Nvidia GPU, the data must be read sequentially at a speed of up to 110 GB/s. Optionally, up to 16 million IOPS must be achieved.
Such values are unthinkable with conventional NVMe RAID cards. Even an Aorus Xtreme Gen4 AIC SSD with eight fast Phison E18 SSDs and a 28 GB/s package seems slow.
A GPU-based RAID controller
However, the GRAID card works fundamentally differently: it is equipped with an Nvidia A2000, the smallest workstation GPU of the current generation. This takes over the computing power to manage data transfers through a virtual NVMe controller that is installed via software.
Up to 32 NVMe SSDs can be connected to each other via the PCIe interface in RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, or 10 modes, but they are not on the adapter card. For space reasons, this would not work at all, especially since the power supply via the PCIe slot is a maximum of 75 watts and the Nvidia A2000 is already specified with 70 watts.
I/O requests are handled directly by the SupremeRAID SR-1010 processed, which relieves the CPU. Basically, it’s a GPU-powered virtual NVMe RAID controller.
On Linux up to 110 GB/s and 19 million IOPS
GRAID makes different claims about maximum performance, which varies by operating system and RAID mode. The absolute maximum of 110 GB/s for sequential read, 25 GB/s for sequential write and 19 million IOPS for random read and 6 million IOPS for random write is therefore achieved under Linux in the RAID 10 array. Performance under Windows is significantly lower with a maximum of 74 GB/s and 2 million IOPS, indicating an operating system limitation.
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Maximum performance under Linux (Image: GRAID)
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The website storage review have the Predecessor with Nvidia T1000 tested and already confirmed to have great advantages in terms of performance, IOPS and latencies compared to conventional software RAID. The solution is an alternative to multiple hardware RAID controller cards.
SupremeRAID SR-1010 is the first NVMe and NVMeoF RAID card that unlocks the full potential of SSD performance. As detailed in the original review of the SR-1000, the SupremeRAID card directly processes I/O, relying on the CPU for this task. And, because the card is a GPU, there’s tremendous computational power on the card that doesn’t exist on standard RAID cards.
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