[THIN] Re: OT: Effect of Solid State drives
- From: "M" <mathras@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 00:24:53 +0100
Interesting (as usual ) post from Rick. I did some searching but couldnt find
too much myself.
The drives are very cheap..ish though 170 quid for 16GB
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=558789&source=froogle
According to the specs
. Super-low operating and standby power needs
. Extends battery life up to 10%
. No moving parts to fail
. Greater resistance to shock & vibration
. Operates in extreme temperatures (-20° to 80°C)
. No spin up
. No seek time
. No rotational latency
. Sustained high-speed data transfers
. 56MB/s read, 32MB/s write speeds
. Can cut boot-up time in half
. Noise free
. Virtually no heat emissions
. Less than half the weight of conventional hard drive
In an energy conscious world they sound ideal
The 15K SAS drives are already out. I have been trialling them with Quad Core
HP Blades for a few months now. Cant find any major performance difference
between them and our Blades with 15K u320's
----- Original Message -----
From: Malcolm Bruton
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 12:05 AM
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: Effect of Solid State drives
Rick. Do you have any details of the performance? Did a quick Google but
didn't see much. I've read that at the moment there is no real difference
between speed of the flash drives vs. traditional laptop hard disks. I do
expect this to change though in the future. The new 2.5 inch 10,000 RPM SAS
drives are pretty fast vs. the old 3.5 inch 15 K SCSI drives and I know that
HP/Seagate are talking 15K 2.5 inch SAS versions soon as well.
The article was in a PC mag in the UK but I can't find an online version.
The Samsung drive was faster in some benchmarks when compared with a 5400 std
notebook drives but not all tests
Malcolm
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Rick Mack
Sent: 06 June 2007 22:54
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] OT: Effect of Solid State drives
Hi,
Pardon this off topic post, but I think there are ging to be some interesting
changes in our server environment with the advent of almost affordable solid
state flash dirves (SSD)
Both Samsung (in production) and SANDisk (near production) have announced 64
GB solid state drives in a 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factor.
I thought it'd be fun to comment and speculate on some of the things that are
likely to happen.
The main push for these drives is into the laptop market, but I think the
impact will be much greater once people realise that they will solve major
server bottlenecks.
At the moment they'll probably cost about $10-15 a GB but considering the
total cost of your average server, that's really not going to break the bank.
With 100 microsecond "seek" times and sustainable data transfer rates of 45
MB/sec (now) they are going to blow small (72 GB) server disks out of the
water. Very fast seek times means no seek optimization is required so the
performance difference between parallel IDE, serial IDE and SCSI (serial or
parallel) for random i/o will be irrelevant.
Imagine an IDE-based blade that blows a SCSI blade out of the water.
Or a dual quad core server that can actually use all that CPU horsepower.
Smaller and more reliable power supplies because we don't have to deal with
disk startup surges.
Hard disks that can be treated like USB flash drives.
A 1000000 hour MTBF, "instant" spinup time means very fast and reliable disk
storage systems can can start being power optimized.
SANs will be slow compared to local hard disks and no more reliable.
Considering the cost per GB of your average SAN and the observation that if we
disregard the management software their main claim to fame is reliability, I
think it's fair to speculate there will be a shakeup in the SAN market. The
main claim to fame for SANs is their reliability, but what if we've got an even
more reliable technology that's much faster. An SSD based SAN would be
sufficiently simple that it shouln't cost a lot more. Smaller, faster, quieter.
Bank 10 SSD (1.8") drives together with RAID 0 and we're talking about a disk
subsystem that can maintain disk i/o at nearly data bus speeds. Lets put 50-100
SSD disks into a SAN and suddenly a lot of things have to change.
Fibre channel won't be fast enough and using a traditional switch fabric just
won't hack the pace. We're likely to see SAS or SATA direct connect options
into a SAN, with as many SAN connect interfaces as we have SAN-requiring hosts.
Or a distributed SAN infrastructure, maybe based on iSCSI.
Traditional hard disks will only be used for temporary or very high capacity
storage. Unless Seagate and Maxtor produce some interesting 3 layer (RAM cache,
Flash Cache, disk) hybrid technology to make up the performance difference,
their shares are going to plummet.
I can hardly wait ;-)
regards,
Rick
--
Ulrich Mack
Commander Australia
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