Intel Takes SATA Performance Crown With X25-E SSD 164
theraindog writes "We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors off the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s, and offers ten times the lifespan of its predecessor, all while retaining Intel's wicked-fast storage controller and crafty Native Command Queuing support. The Extreme isn't cheap, of course, but The Tech Report's in-depth review of the drive suggests that if you consider its cost in terms of performance, the X25-E actually represents good value for demanding multi-user environments."
Dedicated Database Storage (Score:4, Informative)
This just screams dedicated database storage.
wicked-fast door blowing screams? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:wicked-fast door blowing screams? (Score:5, Interesting)
You be the judge [techreport.com]. I would consider a factor of 80x improvement in IO/s over the best HDD, and 2x your best competitor (yourself) "wicked-fast door blowing screams" if you're looking at transaction processing for a database or other IOPS bound application. This is not the review that's overzealous about a 4% processor speed improvement. Stripe that across 5 or 10 of these bad boys and the upside potential is, um, noticable? If we can't get a little enthusiastic about that what does merit it? A flame paint job and racing stripes? A Ferrari logo? The next step up from here is RAMdisk. Yeah, it's not going to make Vista boot in 4 seconds. Is that the metric that's driving you?
Capacity is still lacking at 32GB, but obviously they could expand it now and 64GB will be available next year. Naturally if they wanted to make a 3.5" form factor they could saturate the bandwidth of the interface and stuff 320GB into a drive with no problem if they wanted to court the folks who can (and most definitely would) pay $10,000 for that premium product (HINT HINT). Obviously the price bites, but they can get it for this, so why not? Naturally for challenging environments (vibration, rotation, dropping under use, space applications, heat) it's a big win all the way around. Isn't SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) due soon?
I think I foresaw some of these improvements here some years ago. I'm glad to see them in use. If I were to look forward again I would say that it might be time to abandon the euphemism of a hard disk drive for flash storage, at least for high end devices. You can already reconfigure these chips in the above mentioned 320GB drive to saturate a PCIe 2.0 x4 link (20Gigatransfers/sec), which makes a nice attach for Infiniband DDR x4. The SATA interface allows a synthetic abstraction that is useful, but the useful part is that it's an abstraction -- you don't need to continue the cylinder/block/sector metaphor once you accept the utility of the abstraction.
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Re:wicked-fast door blowing screams? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now plug these things into your SAN -- because they plug right in -- and do the math again. 50% price premium for 80x the aggregate IOPS and 10x the bandwidth? Your SAN needs new connectors to handle the speed.
This is a slam dunk. Admit it.
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"our Lotus Notes servers are almost as rough on the SAN as the DB servers, huge numbers of IOPS and almost as much storage."
I have no idea if you fall into this category, but many, MANY Domino administrators who implement with a SAN do so in a suboptimal fashion. A Domino server should have considerable resources on local drives even if you are committed to a SAN for your primary data storage. All system NSFs should be stored on local drives, as well as your transaction log (you are using transaction logs
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Throw 300GB 10K disks for bulk storage fronted by a couple GB of write cache and these drives for things like transaction logs and you are looking at a real winning combination.
Like this [sun.com] ?
One of our biggest surprises is that our Lotus Notes servers are almost as rough on the SAN as the DB servers, huge numbers of IOPS and almost as much storage.
Sounds like your Lotus servers might need some more RAM ?
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$ per GB is the deal killer here. Most of our customers balk over spending more on regular drive space when you are talking about terabyte dbs. I could only see these being good for maybe log or temp space until the price comes way down.
Re:Dedicated Database Storage (Score:5, Funny)
This just screams dedicated database storage.
NO, THIS JUST SCREAMS DEDICATED DATABASE STORAGE!!!
filter
fodder
Software development (Score:2)
My first thought is builds. I have to do Windows CE 5.0 builds all the time and they're almost entirely I/O bound. I've also compiled Xfree86 before at another job. It seems like the really large compiles are mostly I/O bound. The CPU doesn't peg, but the hard drive light stays lit.
Something like this would be fantastic for development. I really want one.
Re:Software development (Score:5, Informative)
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I often do compiles (Gentoo) on a ram disk.
Linux desktop systems doesnt use anywhere near the amount of ram modern systems have so just make a tmpfs mount and the compiles fly. :)
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I mainly do it on my laptop so the HDD isnt as fast as desktops.
Still it does make a reasonable difference especially for big compiles. Try it out for yourself.
Merging is significantly faster since its copying Ram to the hard drive instead of hard drive to hard drive.
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I often do compiles (Gentoo) on a ram disk.
So do I, but it's built-in and my system refers to it as "cache". Why not let the OS decide what to store in RAM? It's really good at that kind of stuff.
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Did you even read the summary?
We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors of the competition
Oh, gimme more of that door knob!
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So why the fuck isn't it SAS?
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Good price, actually. (Score:2)
Considering I have a couple of HP DL380 G5s with 2.5" 72GB 15K SAS drives, each set me back about $600 (after education discount) ... the cost of this drive $738.84 with a truckload of performance to boot is a heck of a deal.
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Yup, and it uses SLC chips so it has an enormously long lifetime, around 70 years according to Intel.
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70 years of doing what exactly?
Its entirely workload dependent.
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Since you seem to know about this, how long would a normal Disk last in that environment?
Re:Good price, actually. (Score:4, Interesting)
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It sure depends on your environment, my database would love these drives. We are going to be no where near 100GB writes a day for a long time, but the massive IO increase would come in handy for our reads.
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Actually even if you do do use it for swap, or some application that writes to out absolutely flat out the lifetime is less than Intel quotes. If I use the formula here
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html [storagesearch.com]
2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds.
I can work out how much less.
If you substitute the figures Intel gives for write endurance (100000), capacity(80GB) and write speed(170MB/sec) you only get 1.5 years. Bear in mind that's for an application that writes flat out at 170MB/sec 24 hours a day.
The odd thing is if you compare it t
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SAS has taken over SCSI's role as the drive of choice to sell to customers who are willing to overpay for the cache of owning a premium product.
You could have guessed that from the full name: Serial Attached SCSI. I guess if you can't buy a new media technology from Sony, this'll work.
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15K drives exist for a reason (at least they did until now), and they're only available in SAS or FC. I suspect the SAS version is actually the cheap one.
Not a good price, actually. (Score:2)
And neither one is as reliable or has the IOPS of three standard SATA drives that cost 50% of the price for 10x the storage.
Math. It's a wonderful thing. Use it with your salesman.
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So is ignorance apparently.
SAS is duplex, SATA isn't. I'll take one SAS drive over 3 SATA drives any time when it comes to performance.
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Here's where I would go with a useful link [techworld.com]. "Duplex" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means in this context. The use of this term bare is misleading, as perhaps the marketing person who invented the meme intended to be.
"FYI, SAS full duplex means that one channel can be used for data traffic and the other channel can be simultaneously used for command traffic. Both channels cannot be simultaneously used for data. So when Mr Batty says 6Gb/s is available and that's 4x SATA I, he is technically correct, but end users will not see 4x performance."
If you can't sell on the features, it's ok for some people to make stuff up when they're selling. But not us, here, ok? Let's be honest with one another here around the water cooler.
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Math. It's a wonderful thing. Use it with your salesman.
Have you used your "math" to figure out how much more tripling rack space requirement and doubling the power consumption will cost ?
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There are actually a few compelling use cases... Short of space is one of them. Server consolidation has freed up a lot of rack space lately, though, so most people have the space.
And we're talking about drives that burn under one watt running full out. How many do your SAS 15K RPM drives burn?
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And we're talking about drives that burn under one watt running full out. How many do your SAS 15K RPM drives burn?
Which SATA drives use less than a watt *at all*, let alone "full out" ?
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proper comparison? (Score:2)
Re:proper comparison? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who tells you SSDs are a replacement for disks is at best talking about some niche workloads and at worst trying to sell you a line of the old BS. SSDs render 15k rpm disks obsolete all right, but not in the way you're suggesting.
To get the same capacity as you'd get out of those hot, expensive disks - which is not a lot given what you're paying for them - you'd need to spend much more, and you'll likely find that performance levels off quickly when you saturate out your HBAs and/or CPUs and/or memory bus and/or front-end connectivity. Much better to combine a few of these with slow, cool, cheap disks to maximise both performance and capacity at a lower price than the 15k disks.
Let's take an example.
Suppose you have 14 146GB 15k rpm disks. They cost you $2000 apiece, or $28000. Each one gives you 300 IOPS, for a total of 4200 (we'll ignore the costs and inefficiencies of the hardware RAID dinosaur you're probably using these with; if we didn't, you might start to feel stupid about it). So you spent about $6.67/IOPS or $14/GB, plus the power and cooling to keep those disks spinning. Not cheap. Not particularly fast. Not really great in any way.
Suppose instead that you want to replace them with these 80GB SSDs. You'll probably pay your vendor around $1400 for them (figure 60% margin like they're getting on those FC drives you've been buying from them). Now you need 26 of them to get the same capacity, costing you $36400. But you get about 12000 read IOPS each (write latency suspiciously omitted from this fluff piece, but we'll dubiously assume it's similar - it almost certainly isn't anywhere close) for a total of 312000. Too bad your HBA can do only about 140000, so you'll max out there on random reads. And if we're talking about block sizes larger than 512 bytes, latency will be higher. So you've spent $0.26/IOPS, which is great, and you've saved money on operating costs as well. But you actually spent a lot more in total - $18/GB - and woe unto you if you need more capacity; demand for storage tends to double every 12-18 months, and adding in 80GB chunks at $18/GB is going to hurt. Sure, prices will drop, but not fast enough to be competitive with the multi-TB disks we're already seeing today.
Finally, suppose instead that you buy 2 of these SSDs to act as log devices and then buy 4 1TB 7200rpm SAS disks for $350 each. You've spent $4200 and you've gotten 24000 IOPS. That's $0.18/IOPS or $0.48/GB, and you've actually spent much less in absolute terms as well. You're still spending only a tiny fraction in power and cooling of what you were spending on the original all-disk solution, and you've got twice as much total storage capacity. Best of all, you can now grow your storage in two dimensions, not just along a line fixed by the disk vendors. Need more IOPS? Add another SSD or two. Need more capacity or streaming bandwidth? Add some more rotating rust.
This approach gives you the best of all worlds, something you can't get by blindly replacing all your disks with SSDs. In other words, you get to pick the spot along the performance/cost/capacity curve that's right for your application. Using only SSDs, only slow disks, or only expensive disks doesn't do that. Upon a moment's though, this should be obvious: when your computer needs to perform better, adding DRAM is usually the best way to make that happen. When it needs to store more data, adding disks is the way to go. You don't add disks to improve performance (one hopes... if you need to do that, your storage vendor is probably taking you to strip clubs) and you don't add DRAM to increase storage capacity. This is no different. Flash occupies an intermediate spot in the memory hierarchy and has to be thought of that way. It's exciting to see the prices fall and capacities rise like they have, but I don't think a lot of people really understand yet just how SSDs are going to change things.
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Do a test based on price.
$x,xxx worth of SAS/SCSI disks vs $x,xxx worth of SSD drives.
See which is faster then.
Thats the most realistic benchmark (for people without infinitely deep pockets).
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s/faster/more reliable/g
It's not about speed to me (Score:2)
Re:It's not about speed to me (Score:4, Insightful)
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A 72 year lifespan? How much more improvement do you need? It seems like price is the only remaining hurdle for SSDs.
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why do you need improvement with that? I assume you'll probably replace the drive in 10 years... 10 years ago consumer PCs used 8gig hard drives. I don't see many 8gig hard drives lying around today. Assuming you'll replace it in 10 years, you can do 700GB of write-erase per day, which means you could reflash the entire drive 20 times a day... How often do you do that on your Aspire One?
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Why no swapping, journaling, logging or timestamps? Wear leveling is pretty standard fair for SSDs and AFAIK, at least three of those won't write a significant amount of data to the disk.
I find it strange... (Score:2)
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It's pretty much apples and oranges. Even with batteries (which I wouldn't trust) RAM has different characteristics in power consumption, heat output, storage density etc. By the time you address these challenges you'd have... an SSD.
Plus the SSDs get their long life from having more raw storage than advertised, and dynamically shutting down dead areas and bringing in reserve areas as it ages. Your sums would have to take into account the cost of this "hidden" storage.
As an aside the best use for these thin
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Why would the calculations have to take in to account the hidden storage?
Thats overhead for using SSD technology. Its unnecessary for any other storage.
Adding ram purely for disk cache will increase performance many times better than using SSDs.
Cheaper too.
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Yes, but some legacy operating systems can only address 4G of RAM (including the graphics card). Also, some hardware may not be able to take more ram. I can't think of any machine where 64G of ram is very cheap.
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There are cheaper ones, but I don't know of any that can compete with SSD's on price - if there had been more people would've been using them as harddisk replacements. As it is, the primary market for these units are ext
Lousy storage density, insane price. (Score:2, Informative)
Let's see...$720 [newegg.com] for 32GB ($22/GB) versus $278 for 256GB [newegg.com] ($1/GB.)
Keep in mind that you could buy two of those 256GB drives, mirror them, and exceed (in all likelihood) the performance of the Intel drive, and have eight times as much storage. Since reliability is pretty unproven, having them in a mirror means your ass is suitably covered.
The absolute lowest storage density (SAS doesn't come in anything less than 36GB, and 300GB is the top-end) at $22/GB, when $4/GB is the norm for SAS drives (that's a p
Re:Lousy storage density, insane price. (Score:4, Informative)
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Most of the JMicron controlled SSDs can not have their firmware updated. But I believe the controller chip itself is rather broken, so there is little a firmware update could do anyway.
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You got my hopes up. That's 128GB.
it costs more per gb than ram! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it costs more per gb than ram! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Actually, RAM-SAN has addressed these issues, only thing remaining is the price tag. Think they come in at around 430.000 IOPS, got full drive backup + batteries in a single "box". Would love to get one of those for my database.
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Ok, got my facts wrong. 3.2 Million IOPS, 24GB/s sustainable random data access.
And a linky:
http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/ [superssd.com]
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Yup, violin [violin-memory.com] basically sells the same thing - in a yellow box, too.
The problems with these boxes, until recently, have been price and (obviously) persistence.
Since data is never really persisted you'd only buy them in addition to a traditional SAN (or SSD nowadays), not as a replacement.
When you have the dough you can do interesting things with them, though. I know a company that does most of their transaction processing on violins (financial sector, sick throughput) and uses spindles in a write-behind fashi
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You should read up on Tera Ram-San - the data is indeed persistent, it even comes with internal backup making sure it can dump all data to its internal discs before shutting down.
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...unless it fails, I suppose?
Admittedly I haven't read up on them but most people I know wouldn't be comfortable with such a "persist on shutdown" option - because the interesting scenario is when the box doesn't get a chance to shutdown.
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Well for the box not to get a chance to shutdown would require something very terminally happening, and in that case you are going to have to run down and grab your backups anyways.
Also as I recall the system will periodically flush everything to discs so it doesn't have to make the full write in case of emergencies.
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Flushing to disk imho can not work so well when the box is loaded with more IOPS than the spindles can handle. It's the same problem that every database server is having (RAM vs WAL vs tablespace).
And about the shutdown issue: When you're talking about a scale where such RAM-based SANs get serious consideration then unknown risk factors like "terminal happenings" can usually not be tolerated.
Building in the enough safe-guards to make such a failure sufficiently unlikely is usually more expensive than buildi
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Most high IOPS systems are high because of a high number of random reads. The spinning disk would only need linear writes, which should be pretty easy to sustain maximum transfer rates. That Tera-RamSan appears to use 128GB modules, so each would include its only spinning backup disk. Modern disks can easily sustain 100MB/s. A full dump would take 20 minutes.
I suspect they would at least implemen
Question for slashdotters: (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens when the read-write cycles on this run out?
Re:Question for slashdotters: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Question for slashdotters: (Score:5, Informative)
It becomes a very fast cdrom - read only.
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A *much* better failure model than HDDs forgetting about data on dodgy sectors etc.
Weak test system (Score:5, Interesting)
NCQ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why the heck does a drive that has uniform, low latency random access would even NEED NCQ? NCQ was designed to optimize the seek order in mechanical drives with heads.
Re:NCQ? (Score:4, Informative)
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In soviet russia...
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read here: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15374
Since we had her cornered, we took the opportunity to quiz Huffman about a few other matters. One of those was the interaction of Native Command Queuing and SSDs. We're familiar with NCQ as a means of dealing with the seek and rotational latency inherent in mechanical hard drives, but wondered what need there was for NCQ with SSDs. (Intel's just-announced SSDs have NCQ listed prominently among their specifications.) She said that in the case of SSDs, NCQ has the primary benefit of hiding latency in the host system. If you look at a bus trace, said Huffman, there's quite a bit of time between the completion of a command and the issuance of another one. Queuing up commands can keep the SSD more fully occupied.
SLC too! (Score:2)
Ooh, now that could be a dealmaker in the server room. With RAID-5 reaching its limits for magnetic media, a rack of these could be a viable replacement.
Of course a server room has different priorities to the average gamer:
1. Reliability
2. Reliability
3. Capacity
4. Price
5. Speed
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With RAID-5 reaching its limits for magnetic media, a rack of these could be a viable replacement.
* bracing self for long discussion on RAID levels, file systems, and a certain Unix OS *
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These drives are intended for high performance setups.
It's not RAID vs. these drives - nothing prevent you from using them in RAID setups, and most people using them in servers probably will.
blow the doors of the competition? (Score:2)
I believe you meant to say, ``blow the doors off the competition,'' but let's just say the "cost" of those drives ``blows chunks.''
Blowing The Doors off (Score:2)
"Oi! You're only supposed
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Does the performance degrade with use? (Score:3, Interesting)
The earlier model of Intel SSD had some serious performance degradation [matbe.com] after a few hours of heavy use. (Article in French, but it says that after a ten minute torture with IOmeter writing small blocks to the drive, and even after waiting an hour for the drive to 'recover', performance drops by about 70%.) I wonder if they have fixed this bug with the new model?
Performance crown and new-school math (Score:3, Insightful)
We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors of the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s
Yet, 5 articles down the Slashdot homepage, options depending:
Samsung said it's now mass producing a 256GB solid state disk that it says has sequential read/write rates of 220MB/sec and 200/MBsec, respectively.
I'm pretty sure the improved write speeds is the part that people are interested in with SSDs these days.
Non-volatile RAM disk ? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the techreport article :
Is it time to look at connecting these chips direct to the motherboard ? Avoiding the added complexity of driving what is essentially a block of memory via a serial interface designed to control spinning discs. If the SLC memory chips were mapped into the main memory address space, it should be possible to make them look like a 32G or 64G (NV)RAM drive on a Unix/Linux system. Mount '/' and '/boot' on the (NV)RAM drive and install the OS on it. Presto - very fast boot and load times. You can still use traditional spinning disc(s) for large data, mounted as separate data partitions.
It would need some thought as to which parts of the filesystem went on spinning disc and which parts went on the (NV)RAM partition. But that is why Unix/Linux has all of the tools for mounting different parts of the filesystem on different partitions. Back in the olden days, most systems had a combination of small fast(ish) discs and big(ish) slow discs, and tweaking fstab to mount different parts of the filesystem on different discs was a standard part of the install process. Most desktop systems now have one huge disc, and the standard Linux install dumps everything on one big '/' partition, but all the tools for optimizing the partition layout are still there.
How about an ultra quiet desktop workstation with no moving parts, the OS installed on (NV)RAM disc, and user data dragged across the network from a fileserver (e.g NFS mounted /home).
ZFS should like these (Score:2)
ZFS in recent Solaris Nevada and FreeBSD CURRENT supports a feature called L2ARC; Level-2 Advanced Replacement Cache. This is basically the ZFS filesystem/metadata cache, backed by so-called cache devices.
So, you can get your 32GB SSD, shove it in front of your n-TB ZFS array, and it'll use it to help accelerate random reads. 32GB of storage is a bit feeble, but 32GB of cache.. that's rather compelling, especially if your storage is otherwise backed by cheap and cheerful 7200RPM disks.
Fusion IOdrive is faster (Score:3, Interesting)
The Fusion IOdrive is faster...about 510 Mb/s according to dvnation. At $30/GB, that's not bad. Granted, the Intel one is $22/GB...but it has about twice the performance; and it's only priced about 1.4x the price of the Intel ssd.
Memoright / Mitron? (Score:2)
Re:Blowing doors of competition (Score:5, Funny)
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I've worked with them before. They're a real bunch of knobs.
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NCQ gives the SSD something to do while the host is figuring out what to write or read next. Normally it's used to allow the host to fire and forget 32 commands. In this case, you queue up a bunch of stuff, then figure out what to queue next.
SSDs are so much faster that the host is generally not keeping up with it.
Re:NCQ on an SSD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if it's solid state, there's still a physical layer, and still a logical-to-physical abstraction that an IDE disk must perform. (Slashdot pedantics will please note that here an IDE disk means a disk with an integrated electronic controller, not just a drive with an ATA interface. If you've never had to know the true physical geometry -- the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors in a disk (CHS)-- to tell your PC's BIOS or OS, you've never used a non-IDE disk. Most BIOS systems were faking CHS numbers by the time EIDE hit in 1994 which eliminated CHS in favor of LBA.)
Flash drives use NAND flash memory, which uses pages of up to about 4 KB. For the most part, you can only access a single page at a time. Additionally, sequential access within a page is almost always faster than random access. Giving the disk's integrated controller a list of values means that it can examine the queue intelligently and can perform paging operations more intelligently.
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If only the RIAA understood that...
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Meh, still not even half as fast as the Fusion IO-Drive. Of course, those cost $3,000+ and run solely on a PCIe 4x ...
We're trialing one now, not interested in production until there's solaris drivers though.