Comments on: Video – Amazing Solid State Drive (SSD) Performance.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:22:54 +0000

I just saw a Tekzilla (http://revision3.com/tekzilla/visback) episode on Solid State drives and they concurred with what you’ve said. It’s kind of like loading apps in memory…

Good info. Keep it coming.

By: Kiwi Si

Kiwi Si — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:03:28 +0000

Hi Jason,

No definitely not – I didn’t read it that way for a second. I really appreciate you comments,as I’m sure do others – keep them coming mate!

By: Jason Boche

Jason Boche — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:43:49 +0000

To be clear, I meant nothing negative about the overclockers comment. I wanted to be sure you aren’t interpreting it that way.

By: Jason Boche

Jason Boche — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:42:12 +0000

I’d love to see some benchmarks. I’m sure they’ll be available mainstream soon. I did see that EMC had them available on their brochures but wasn’t aware HP had them in their EVA line. Without the moving parts in a SSD, I’d think another benefit would be much lower failure rate (assuming we can keep these things cool enough). Less service calls for replacing failed drives (hopefullY). Also, their smaller size – I’m assuming we can fit more of these SSDs in a drive tray then what we can today with non-SSD drives.

Thanks again for the post Simon!

Jas

By: James Pearce

James Pearce — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:40:57 +0000

Since there’s no physical head movement, random IO should be equal to sequential IO – the video missed a bit of a trick there, although it’s still awesome

EqualLogic PS6000 arrays are available with 16x SSDs, if you can stomach the cost! Interestingly run their fans in maximum speed mode all the time when using SSDs (?).

So using a pair of PS6000s, one with SSDs and the other with SATA drives, we’d get the capacity of the SATA disks AND the speed of SSDs which will automatically be used for hot-blocks (supposedly).

By: Kiwi Si

Kiwi Si — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:25:31 +0000

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the comment. True, more of an overclockers type video but what I thought, and in hindsight didn’t convey clearly in the post was the application these sort of speeds will have for Enterprise computing once SSD hits mass mainstream.

Both EMC and HP have SSD offerings at the moment though, at least to my knowledge with HP, there is some limitation on numbers eg: you can only have up to 8 SSD drives in an EVA installation. It’d be interesting to get some benchmarks off of a medium/large VM farm running on SSD’s – I’m not sure if there are any implications or gotchas in doing so apart from the possible limited NAND re-writes (about 100K writes off the top of my head).

Throughput speeds compared to SAS (and jump in anyone if I have got this wrong) would be the same or similar on the controller but would offer significant low latency in IO’s particularly random IO’s making it preferable for performance servers/VMs.

I’m just waiting for the price of SSDs to drop and will then buy one to test in my home lab. Just can’t justify the expense at the moment.

All the best,

Simon