You will need an Nvidia GPU to achieve some of the fastest SSD speeds ever — here's how and why

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Graid's SupremeRAID technology combines a GPU with a software-defined storage (SDS) stack to deliver frighteningly high storage speeds that go above what most servers can hit today with conventional RAID configurations.

By pairing Graid's SupremeRAID card with the Nvidia RTX A2000 GPU, Storage Review managed to hit 5.6M IOPS at 1.1ms using the best RAID performance at 4K chunk size, while Graid landed a result of 28.5M IOPS in the same test.

The system they used fitted a Supermicro AS-2125HS-TNR server with two AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs, 384GB DRAM, and 24 3.84TB KIOXIA’s CM7-R Gen5 SSDs. They configured the drives into a RAID5 configuration with a 4K stripe size for Graid.

RAID vs SupremeRAID

RAID cards are limited to 28GB/s speeds with Gen4 SSDs, with four Gen4 SSDs saturating one RAID card, and several required to maximize usage of a 24-bay server.

SupremeRAID, on the other hand, can support 32 drives in one system and isn't limited by maximum PCIe slot bandwidth. Using the Graid system, therefore, may work to resolve the bottlenecks in a conventional server confiugration.

It also gives the GPU license to handle the drive management and data protection – alleviating this from the CPU and freeing it to run applications.

Storage Review used Nvidida A2000 GPUs in testing, which are relatively inexpensive, to hit 28M IOPS alongside speeds of up to 260GB/s. This is despite the card using a Gen4 interface, but this doesn't prevent it from reaching performance levels of Gen5 SSDs.

The fastest SSDs in isolation can hit speeds approaching 15GB/s, by contrast, with Phison’s PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSD, for instance, reaching sequential read speeds of 14,175MB/s and writes of 12,741MB/s

Although the publication tested this on Nvidia A2000 GPUs, meanwhile, Graid's software is compatible with just about any Nvidia GPU. These are easy to install and don't require additional battery power, it added.

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Keumars Afifi-Sabet is the Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.