At first glance, the SupremeRAID SR-1010 looks like a graphics card, but it is hardware focused on managing multiple solid-state storage drives or SSDs in a data center or server. It’s actually both, and it’s an example of how graphics hardware has evolved since it stopped focusing solely on displaying beautiful graphics for video games.
The product we’re talking about now isn’t new, having been released in a limited fashion in the summer of last year, but it demonstrates one of the inherent problems with adopting SSDs as a storage method. . Having to deal with the large volume of data passing from the drive to RAM via the PCI Express interface can choke entire processor cores.
The solution? The use of support processors responsible for managing said communication and leaving the main processor free for its usual tasks. This is the case with the next-generation Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles, which incorporate domain-specific processors and fixed functional units that together manage not only the copying of data, but also the ability to compress and decompress the data.
SupremeRAID SR-1010, a graphics card as an SSD controller?
However, a very original solution for managing large volumes of data is the use of an NVIDIA graphics card, in this case an A2000, for a function other than its common vocation. That’s what the folks at GRAID have done with their SupremeRAID SR-1010. We have already seen them in tasks such as mining, but in this case we are talking about a graphics card to manage the SSD. In total it can manage up to 32 different units, so as you may have understood it is not a solution for a home system, but for a data center or a server and especially for the management of a NVMe-Of system
Therefore the SupremeRAID SR-1010 it bridges the various NVMe SSDs of the server and the system RAM. able to drive up to 110 GB/s transfer per second to SSDs and supporting the following RAID levels: 0, 1, 5, 6, 10. All this on one card with a 70W power consumption and with an i16-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. If we are already talking about performance, it will depend on the operating system used, the size of the data blocks, whether access is sequential or random, and the level of RAID. Above these lines you can find the performance of this particular hardware under different scenarios.
Will we see it on our PC in the future?
Enter as is as we described in the previous section no. If there is a key point for the adoption of SSDs on a large scale, it is storage. Which brings us to something that at the moment is unheard of on PC, however, on consoles there are already data compression and decompression mechanisms capable of decompressing several GB per second on the fly without the participation of the central processor. which would need multiple cores for that and I would do it in an excessively long time.
One of the key technologies is the ability of new graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD to access content from SSDs without involving the CPU in the process. It means if our graphics hardware is powerful enough, then the graphics hardware can support the on-the-fly data compression and decompression and without processor involvement. Which will be a huge advantage, since pwe will be able to reduce the installations of our data and applications without any problem, make space on SSDs less of a problem.
The graph used for SupremeRAID SR-1010 is an NVIDIA A2000, which is based on the same chip as the RTX-3060 and is powerful enough to handle a complex RAID system and up to 32 drives. We have no doubt that when the future NVIDIA RTX 40 and AMD RX 7000 release, they will include optimizations so that high-speed SSDs aren’t a burden on the CPU.
