Redundant Array of Incompatible Disks

Some of you may or may not have heard of the new Indilinx based SSD drives. These MLC based SSDs are quite attractive in terms of pricing, and best of all no longer have the stuttering problems that were present in older non-intel MLC drives.

Probably the most well known of these knew SSD drives is the OCZ Vertex. Partially the reason for this success is the Anandtech article that profiles some of the inner workings behind how these OCZ drives came to be, but more particularly these drives are fast and (relatively) inexpensive. A plethora of benchmarks are available.

But obviously I'm not just here to extol the virtues of this drive - that's hardly the point of this blog. Verily, I offer you a darker side that is not discussed widely in the reviews that you read. I speak none other than the RAID support for the drive. If you look on the spec page for it, you'll find on the left that there is an apparent "RAID Support". While the deeper semantic discussion (read: ranting) of what that is supposed to constitute for drives in general are beyond this post, let us discuss it as relevant to this particular drive.

You see, it apparently means software RAID ONLY. As some denizens of the OCZ discussion forums have discovered, and I confirmed, getting the new Indilinx drives to work under apparently any hardware raid controller is an exercise in futility. You don't really even have to add it to a RAID volume - it simply needs to be connected to start flapping and spewing SCSI errors. There is no fix, and the only workaround that I found to work is to use a SAS expander.

In comparison, the Intel SSDs of both SLC and MLC varieties are well supported under hardware RAID, playing nice with most if not all configurations. So why the disparity? Is the problem with the firmware or (worse) with the Indilinx controller? More importantly, why market a "feature" that is basically not present? We just don't know. All we can do is wait and hope for it to be fixed, if it can be fixed.

In the meantime, there are some rather unhappy high-end users, a small portion of the user base, but a vocal one. More importantly, this makes the Indilinx drives unusable for enterprise RAID applications, delegating them instead to a more suitable role of hosting operating system volumes and the like. If the companies using these controllers want into that market, they'd better start cracking.