Here's my boot drive, not an SSD, but not bad...
Very funny.
Anyone have max transfer rates on that 'old controller'?
I've found two drives is good, more is point of diminishing returns in Raid O, with Scsi 15k drives.
I could be wrong. Could be my old 320 Megaraid 1 controller can't get over 120 mb/sec....
OK, OK, I give. I may just get a 64GB X25-E and use it independently. I don't know what to connect it to though. There are no free ports left.
Someone did a review of 4 of the X-25E in RAID-0 on a high-end controller, and it actually showed performance loss in low-load scenarios. Otherwise I would be all over it. I may need to do it anyway, I only have 10GB free of the 32GB.
Where is that reference? Is it worse in I/O or in transfer rate? I was hoping that maybe a couple of the X25-M drives would be close to a single X25-E.
Here is a review, though I'm not sure if it is the same one.
For what it's worth:
In my experience playing with Raid 0's, two drives seem to be optimal for performance. I've setup as many as 6, but, even though they look great on the tests, they just don't seem to be much of an improvement over a two drive array.
I wonder if that might be true with these SSD's, or, it might be a controller issue?
Keep in mind that is for use as a workstation, in both the old macs and current setups.
The horror!I only have 10GB free of the 32GB.
I was on the fence about getting one, and that article has convinced me they're still not ready for prime time.
Some users of non-Intel MLC-based flash drives have worked around their small write slowness by using Microsoft Windows SteadyState. Officially meant to be supercharged version of System Restore, able to ‘reset’ the entire OS back to a default state on each reboot in a VMware snapshot-like fashion, it provides MLC flash users with an added bonus through its execution. SteadyState reroutes all disk writes, regardless of their randomness, to a contiguous ‘change’ file. This brings small write performance much closer to the ‘sequential write’ speed of a given drive. In the case of the X25-M, it will significantly reduce the internal fragmentation that occurs as a result of random writes. If you are a Windows user and willing to deal with the various pros and cons of running something like SteadyState, it may be worth checking out, regardless of the SSD you may currently be using.
That's a pretty interesting idea. Does anyone have any more information about how this works? Can I run this with 2003 Server?
That is an interesting idea. Got link? I might try to put some of the slower SSDs back into service if they can get faster.
SteadyState doesn't support Windows 2003 Server.
HMMM. Wonder if formatting the drive with a larger block size would exacerbate, or reduce this problem? While a larger block size might reduce the drive capacity, it might reduce this problem?
Also, thanks for excellent links. It looks like I should wait a bit, and, this might be a part of a general machine upgrade. Also looks like MSFT is working on fixing some of the problems, and, Windows 7 compatibility is going to need to be a requirement.
Good reading...
There are strategies for formatting these drives with a block size that matches the size of the erase block. When a MLC SSD needs to write some data, it has to clear the space before it can write to it. Most drives have to clear 512KB of space before writing. So, even if you are writing a 1KB file, 512KB still has to be cleared. Someone correct me if my understanding is incorrect.
X25-E
A review, however, entitled "Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs" on technology Web site PC Perspectives claimed, among other things, that the Intel X25-M solid-state drive may degrade in performance as a result of "internal fragmentation" and that "a 'used' X25-M will always perform worse than a 'new' one" and, in some cases, drives "would drop to significantly below manufacturer specs."
The reviewers claimed that they made an effort to reproduce real-world scenarios. "Dozens of different scenarios were played out on our drives. XP / Vista installs, repeated application / game installs, batch copying of files...were all liberally applied to the X25-M." The review concluded that "all three of our SSDs suffered a drop in performance regardless of the type of workload applied to them."
iPhone-savvy Wiki services and remote access
Apple's web-centric approach to serving businesses' information sharing needs extends to Mac OS X's collaboration services, which provides web-based wikis, blogs, mailing lists, and RSS feeds tied in with Open Directory users, comparable in some respects to Microsoft's SharePoint services.
In Snow Leopard, those features will be enhanced with search across multiple wikis, a template optimized for mobile use on the iPhone, and a central My Page site customized to provide access to all of the updates to the intranet wiki sites a user selects to track.
Along with sending push notifications to mobile users outside the company's local network, Snow Leopard Server also enables mobile access for setting up secure incoming connections to remote users, providing them with proxy service access to their corporate email and intranet websites.
Snow Leopard shared performance updates
Snow Leopard Server will also inherit the same kernel updates as the Snow Leopard desktop version, with full 64-bit addressing to handle massive amounts of RAM. That's a particular advantage in the the server realm, where applications can take full advantage of wide resources to accommodate more simultaneous network users. Leopard Server already employs 64-bit versions of many of its non-kernel services, from Apache web hosting to email.
The move to a 64-bit kernel will give Snow Leopard Server security advantages as well, as noted in a previous article. Other new architecture changes due in the Snow Leopard kernel will also benefit the Server side, including Grand Central technology for optimizing performance on multiple-core and multiple-processor hardware.
Once past the fairly painless installation of the Windows 7 beta, Mac users will be struck with deja vu. This new version of Windows looks more like Mac OS X than any previous edition ever offered by Microsoft.
.....
One size fits all
There are still some differences between the Taskbar and the Mac OS X Dock: the Windows 7 version (which may yet still change before its release) must be manually "unlocked” before resizing it, and then can only be resized in half inch-sized increments.
Even so, resizing the Taskbar neither resizes the icons (as it would in Mac OS X) nor provides more vertical room for organizing Taskbar items (as Windows users might expect). You can’t organize icons in vertical rows, making it fairly useless to change the vertical height of the Taskbar. There’s also no Dock-like magnification.
Taskbar app icons sit within a metallic looking panel which becomes glass-like blocks that highlight when the app is active in the foreground or running. The early betas of Mac OS X in 2000 similarly lacked both a transparent background and smooth vector scaling (below, Mac OS X DP3).