You will need an Nvidia GPU to achieve some of the fastest SSD speeds ever — here’s how and why
Graid's SupremeRAID technology combines a GPU with a software-defined storage (SDS) stack to deliver terrifyingly fast storage speeds beyond what most servers today can achieve with conventional RAID configurations.
By pairing Graid's SupremeRAID card with the Nvidia RTX A2000 GPU, Storage overview managed to achieve 5.6 million IOPS at 1.1 ms with the best RAID performance at a 4K chunk size, while Graid achieved a result of 28.5 million IOPS in the same test.
The system they used was equipped with a Supermicro AS-2125HS-TNR server with two AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs, 384 GB of DRAM and 24 3.84 TB KIOXIA's CM7-R Gen5 SSDs. They configured the drives in a RAID5 configuration with a 4K stripe size for Graid.
The best RAID configuration achieved 205k IOPS at 15.01 ms with a 64K chunk, compared to Graid which achieved 2.02M IOPS at 1.52 ms.
RAID vs. SupremeRAID
RAID cards are limited to speeds of 28 GB/s with Gen4 SSDs, with four Gen4 SSDs saturating one RAID card, and several are needed to maximize the usage of a 24-bay server.
SupremeRAID, on the other hand, can support 32 drives in a single system and is not limited by maximum PCIe slot bandwidth. Using the Graid system can therefore solve the bottlenecks in a conventional server configuration.
It also licenses the GPU to handle disk management and data protection, taking the burden off the CPU and freeing it up to run applications.
In testing, Storage Review used Nvidida A2000 GPUs, which are relatively cheap, to achieve 28M IOPS in addition to speeds of up to 260GB/s. This is despite the card using a Gen4 interface, but this doesn't prevent it from reaching the performance levels of Gen5 SSDs.
The fastest SSDs on its own, speeds approaching 15 GB/s can be achieved Phison's PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSDachieving, for example, sequential read speeds of 14,175 MB/s and write speeds of 12,741 MB/s
Although the publication tested this on Nvidia A2000 GPUs, Graid's software is compatible with virtually any Nvidia GPU. These are easy to install and do not require additional battery power, it added.