Intel's First SSD Blows Doors Off Competition 282
theraindog writes "Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."
Well, a step in the right direction (Score:5, Insightful)
A step in the right direction, but at $600 per 1000 I am gonna wait a bit longer before jumping on the SSD bandwagon.
It's not the speed, it's the storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:but is it fast enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Gonna Take a Little While Yet (Score:2, Insightful)
However, they're going to need to get a lot cheaper, and we're going to need to see capacities in the hundreds of gigabytes before they start to take off, but take off they will.
Re:Blows doors off? I call bullshit. (Score:1, Insightful)
To be fair, in a web-serving or database read-only type operation it does in fact blow the doors off everything else. I have never seen IO graphs even close to that good on a single drive (SSD or not).
Re:Blows doors off? I call bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
If anyone's seen the results, it's in first place in speed but not in a "door blowing manner". It's just slightly faster than the next guy.
Pardon me, but it is "blowing down the doors" (and the house too) in some tests, like this one [techreport.com]. More than 3x the number of transactions of the second fastest flash drive? 7x faster than the slowest SSD drive? And the traditional HDDs are so crushed at the bottom I can't make out a ratio, but 30x or more? That is just ownage of the highest level. Yes, the write speeds aren't exactly compelling but for IO and read-heavy uses it's completely mindblowing.
Re:It's not the speed, it's the storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you split up your expectations.
Honestly, how much space do you need for the OS and programs? Have an SSD for these functions, and a traditional HDD for pure space requirements. That'd be more economical too, at least in the short term.
Real use for SSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Western Digital blah blah, 2.5" mobile blah blah. How do they compare to the mainline Hitachi and Seagate 15k Fibre Channel? EMC's SSD offerings? I want to know what I can expect for data warehousing on Oracle RAC.
Thinking about using SSD for external backup (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone know about the general longevity of these devices?
The shelf life of a hard drive isn't incredibly impressive.
Re:NAND versus Memristor? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Blows doors off? I call bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article, NCQ actually makes sense. The Intel drive actually finishes requests before the CPU gets around to asking "are you done yet?". That time between the drive finishing and the drive being told what to do next is spent idle. By supporting NCQ, the drive can convince the CPU to send large batches of commands and get rid of that latency.
It's faster for the same reason that FTP is faster than IRC DCC. FTP just keep sending bytes as long as the other end doesn't close the connection. IRC DCC sends a packet, waits for a reply, sends the next packet, and so on.
Are you sure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quote
4 SCSI-320 Cheetah 32GB, 15K RPM drives in RAID 0.
End Quote
What company would really want to run their DB on a Raid 0 (Striped) Disk setup? Does this not put it at risk from a single spindle failure?
Re:Well, a step in the right direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you tried just putting 16GB of RAM in the database server? Nearly 16GB of cache for a 40GB database should work pretty well.
More geenrally, it's time to start thinking about DB servers that satisfy all reads from memory. It won't be long before the RAM available in a commodity sever is larger than many shops' database. Your caching model would want to be very different if you know you can cache everything.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:3, Insightful)
What company would really want to run their DB on a Raid 0 (Striped) Disk setup?
One who replicates the data to slower backup systems.
Does this not put it at risk from a single spindle failure?
If those were the only spindles involved, sure.
Re:Well, a step in the right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I work in the data warehousing industry.
Re:Well, a step in the right direction (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't be long before the RAM available in a commodity sever is larger than many shops' database.
First law of data: data always expands to fill all available storage.
Second law: doubling your storage only buys you half the extra time you expected.
Final law: no storage is ever enough.
Re:Well, a step in the right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus RAID-0 ain't all it's cracked up to be. I had a Dell XPS600 with RAID 0 and one of the drives went kaput. Guess what happens to all the other drives then ? They're useless.
RAID-0 is exactly what it's cracked up to be. It just may not have been what you're looking for.
Re:Well, a step in the right direction (Score:4, Insightful)
And...what? It doesn't?