SSDs - State of the Product?

Stereodude · Mar 12, 2009

I understand the concept. I'm just saying that I've never seen a RAID controller that actually does it.

Fushigi · Mar 13, 2009

Well, IBM has offered PC server RAID cards since at least 2001 that do it. I won't claim they were affordable but they were available. We've had this tech on the midrange platform for what seems like forever, but then those RAID cards run $5-8K (and do other things for improved performance & reliability).

Santilli · Mar 13, 2009

6 TB 24 drive SSD raid

Well, you all now know what David looks like;-)

ddrueding · Mar 13, 2009

Santilli said:
6 TB 24 drive SSD raid

Well, you all now know what David looks like;-)

Link?

ddrueding · Mar 13, 2009

I was actually wondering if a RAID controller with some onboard cache could give SSDs good small-file performance.

sdbardwick · Mar 13, 2009

ddrueding said:
Link?

Here ya go...

ddrueding · Mar 13, 2009

Ahh. Looks like they got a 24-port RAID card and then used 2 RAID cards and the onboard ports as well?

sdbardwick · Mar 13, 2009

IIRC, the notes at the end of the video said that the RAID cards became the bottleneck, so they redistributed the drives. I wonder if it was the cards or the PCI-E or the southbridge...

ddrueding · Mar 13, 2009

It also says that they removed the second video card because it was bottlenecking the PCI-E Bandwidth.

Santilli · Mar 14, 2009

Just kidding David. Your much better looking then that kid...

Stereodude · Mar 16, 2009

Does anyone ideas why OCZ suggests turning off hibernation support for SSDs? Also, do you guys turn off the pagefile?

ddrueding · Mar 16, 2009

No idea on hibernation, it works well for me. I leave the pagefile on as well (no choice, the laptop only has 4GB of RAM).

Stereodude · Mar 16, 2009

ddrueding said:
No idea on hibernation, it works well for me. I leave the pagefile on as well (no choice, the laptop only has 4GB of RAM).

I'm going to be putting one in my old Dell laptop which has 2GB of RAM. For what I do with it I could probably turn the pagefile off though I'm not sure that will really lengthen the life of the drive significantly.

timwhit · Mar 16, 2009

Stereodude said:
I'm going to be putting one in my old Dell laptop which has 2GB of RAM. For what I do with it I could probably turn the pagefile off though I'm not sure that will really lengthen the life of the drive significantly.

I put the pagefile on another drive. If your laptop only has one drive you could try turning the pagefile off, but some applications with refuse to run under this setup.

Another option is to use SteadyState and keep the pagefile turned on.

ddrueding · Mar 16, 2009

I don't think the lifespan of SSDs will be anything to worry about regardless. Isn't failure at max STR still like 5 years?

Stereodude · Mar 16, 2009

timwhit said:
I put the pagefile on another drive. If your laptop only has one drive you could try turning the pagefile off, but some applications with refuse to run under this setup.

What laptop has more than one drive?

ddrueding · Mar 16, 2009

Stereodude said:
What laptop has more than one drive?

ThinkPads, Dell Precision, some others.

Stereodude · Mar 16, 2009

You mean the old put a 2nd HD in the modular bay instead of an optical drive trick? I'd rather put a 2nd battery or optical drive in there. If set up your system to permanently use the 2nd drive (like the pagefile) you'll be hard pressed to take it out and use the other options.

ddrueding · Mar 16, 2009

Dell Precision will run 2 hard drives and an optical, and a 9-cell battery. They support pre-configured RAID-0 with X25-Es if you are so inclined

Stereodude · Mar 16, 2009

All I can say is this thing rocks. I haven't used this notebook much since installing it, or tweaked anything for it yet, but it's way faster than the conventional HD that was in here.

timwhit · Mar 16, 2009

Stereodude said:
All I can say is this thing rocks. I haven't used this notebook much since installing it, or tweaked anything for it yet, but it's way faster than the conventional HD that was in here.

Have you noticed any stuttering? If not, open up Firefox and then open up 20 tabs in a row and see what happens.

Stereodude · Mar 16, 2009

timwhit said:
Have you noticed any stuttering? If not, open up Firefox and then open up 20 tabs in a row and see what happens.

That pegged my CPU for a bit, but I didn't see anything abnormal beyond that. What does the computer do when it starts stuttering?

timwhit · Mar 17, 2009

Stereodude said:
That pegged my CPU for a bit, but I didn't see anything abnormal beyond that. What does the computer do when it starts stuttering?

Generally, your hdd light will stay lit continually until the drive can finish all of its writes. You will not be able to click on anything until it's finished. Normally under heavy writing with a mechanical drive you can still switch programs, open the Start Menu, etc. Under a long stutter with a SSD you might be able to hit ctrl-alt-delete, but that's about it.

What OS are you running?

If you have time to screw around, pull a backup image and then install SteadyState and see if it feels faster. I was amazing with how much faster my system was after I installed it.

Stereodude · Mar 17, 2009

timwhit said:
Generally, your hdd light will stay lit continually until the drive can finish all of its writes. You will not be able to click on anything until it's finished. Normally under heavy writing with a mechanical drive you can still switch programs, open the Start Menu, etc. Under a long stutter with a SSD you might be able to hit ctrl-alt-delete, but that's about it.

That's certainly not what happened in my test. It was completely usable. The only thing I' did was the partition alignment thing referenced on the OCZ forum before copying the old drive to the new one. I could be CPU limited though. This thing only has a Pentium-M 1.7gHz in it.

What OS are you running?

Win XP SP2 (32-bit).

timwhit · Mar 17, 2009

Stereodude said:
That's certainly not what happened in my test. It was completely usable. The only thing I' did was the partition alignment thing referenced on the OCZ forum before copying the old drive to the new one. I could be CPU limited though. This thing only has a Pentium-M 1.7gHz in it.

It's quite possible that by doing the partition alignment you won't see any stuttering.

I haven't been able to try that yet. The problem with it is if you already have a running system and need to restore a image it will wreck the partition alignment during the restore. At least with Acronis True Image. If there's a different imaging tool that will respect an existing partition layout, then I would give it a shot to see if it offers the same performance as SteadyState.

Stereodude · Mar 17, 2009

The OCZ guide recommended Drive Snapshot, so that's what I used. I subsequently went through their XP optimization guide and did most of the tweaks listed in the first two posts and now it's even faster. I left the pagefile turned on and didn't implement a RAMdisk. I also didn't mess with NtfsDisable8dot3nameCreation or NtfsMemoryUsage.

Santilli · Mar 17, 2009

Anyone have a SSD recommendation for a ATA 6, or whatever, SSD?

Stereodude · Mar 17, 2009

You mean PATA?

Santilli · Mar 17, 2009

I really mean ide, but PATA is somehow the new name?

timwhit · Mar 17, 2009

Santilli said:
I really mean ide, but PATA is somehow the new name?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Advanced_Technology_Attachment

udaman · Mar 17, 2009

Santilli said:
Anyone have a SSD recommendation for a ATA 6, or whatever, SSD?

Been mentioned in the news section and several times before, not available just yet:

http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1442)-C25G3_Solid_State_Drive.aspx

The SanDisk® G3 SSD: Revitalizing Existing Laptops:
Now there's a great way to extend the life of two to three year old business laptop computers, simply by replacing their hard disk drives (HDDs) with SanDisk's G3 2.5’’ PATA SSDs. By boosting the laptops' performance and increasing their reliability, SanDisk G3 SSDs help to improve end users' overall computing experience at a fraction of the cost of a new laptop. This results in greater satisfaction on their part, along with cost savings and enhanced productivity for the organization.

Assuming when they ship, performance meets expectations, no PATA standard can fully ultilize the bandwidth as ata/133 is below that.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16188

SanDisk has announced a new batch of solid-state drives that couples low prices with surprisingly decent rated performance. The new SanDisk G3 SSDs start at just $149 for 60GB of capacity, and the company claims "anticipated sequential performance" of 200MB/s for reads and 140MB/s for writes. Not bad at all.

The G3 series also includes a 120GB variant priced at $249 and a 240GB flavor with a $499 price tag. According to the press release, all three models should be available in either 2.5" or 1.8" form factors and with 300MB/s Serial ATA interfaces. SanDisk also intends to release 2.5" G3 SSDs with parallel ATA interfaces in mid-2009.

As one might expect in light of those prices, the G3 SSDs use multi-level-cell flash memory instead of the more durable (but higher-priced) single-level-cell variety. That said, SanDisk claims the 240GB drive should be able to withstand 160TB of data writes, which is supposedly "sufficient for over 100 years of typical user usage."

udaman · Mar 17, 2009

timwhit said:
Generally, your hdd light will stay lit continually until the drive can finish all of its writes. You will not be able to click on anything until it's finished. Normally under heavy writing with a mechanical drive you can still switch programs, open the Start Menu, etc. Under a long stutter with a SSD you might be able to hit ctrl-alt-delete, but that's about it.

What OS are you running?

If you have time to screw around, pull a backup image and then install SteadyState and see if it feels faster. I was amazing with how much faster my system was after I installed it.

Glad I did not go for the 1st gen SSDs, waiting for the technology (controller firmware) to mature. All that stuff thing of the past now

udaman · Mar 17, 2009

Can you trust your flash SSD specs & benchmarks?

Another Publications Reports Unrepeatable Numbers from Repeated SSD Benchmarks

February 13, 2009 - an article published on PCPerspective.com reported declining performance in successive benchmarks of Intel's fast SSD.

The article mistakenly (in my view) attributes this to fragmentation. But the more likely cause is halo effects and poor garbage collection performance.

^^^see page link sidebar notes.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=270&Itemid=38

After nearly two years of testing Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and Solid State Drive (SSD) products, you might presume that most of the bugs have been ironed out in regard to test tools and SSD firmware. This is not the case, even by a long-shot, as any early OCZ Core series owner will tell you. Problematic firmware aside, testing SSD technology has become a real challenge... at least if you're trying to do it 'right'. That's the point of this article, and to get you to better understand the problem, I must take you through some of my own experiences.

Regardless of your position relative to SSD products, whether you test them or use them, every page of this guide will detail the problem behind our favorite technology. Most of it isn't pretty, I'll warn you now; but every single word is worth reading.

In this article, Benchmark Reviews sets out to detail the performance differences between SSD products attached to the JMicron JMB322 host-based controller and the Intel ICH10R, but instead discovered a larger problem. While read and write performance can sway unpredictably between SATA controllers, the most disturbing subject is the inconsistency between test tools. One version of ATTO Disk Benchmark can record result different from another, while HD-Tach gives different results on the same version and driver. Please read more to learn of the pitfalls and perils when testing SSD's between platforms.

Please join me as I confess my frustrations in detail, and educate you on my test miseries before you are forced to experience them yourselves.

flash SSD Jargon Explained

New Improved SSD Formula!

news flash - Fast symmetric R/W IOPS high endurance, MLC SSD, with 3 levels of wear-leveling, massive over-provisioning, write attenuation and fast garbage collection provides competitive alternative to RAM SSDs...

do you understand the list of ingredients in the solid state drive headlines?

SSD Garbage Collection is an important background process in flash SSD controllers.

Some editors and software vendors (who don't understand flash technology) mistakenly attribute a long term slow down in some SSDs to fragmentation - when really the issue is the ratio of resources allocated to Garbage Collection.

In well designe products which have reserved enough CPU power, internal R/W bandwidth and over-provisioning this "performance degradation" does not occur - or is minimal. For example systems from Violin Memory.

The term Garbage Collection was 1st used in 2002 - in an article we published about flash SSD reliability. Here's the definition below from that article.

The "Garbage Collection Process" eliminates the need to perform erasure of the whole block prior to every write. The "Garbage Collection process" accumulates data marked for erase as "Garbage" and perform whole block erase as space reclamation in order to reuse the block.

The performance impact of fragmentation on HDD performance is well known. Flash SSDs don't suffer from a dropoff in performance due to fragmentation - but there can be a similar performance droppoff over time due to the lower availability of pre-erased blocks. So when benchmarking a new flash SSD (which is initially erased) it's important to take this factor into account.

ddrueding · Mar 17, 2009

Thanks for the nice post/info, uda. Following that link to Violin Memory has me drooling.

4TB of Flash (3 million IOPS) in a 2U chassis saturating the 8x PCIe link (1.7GB/s)? Frickin awesome. One hell of a boot drive

Stereodude · Mar 17, 2009

Santilli said:
I really mean ide, but PATA is somehow the new name?

The 64GB Transcend PATA SSD I put in my old Dell laptop seems quite nice so far. How big of a drive are you looking for?

LunarMist · Mar 18, 2009

ddrueding said:
I was actually wondering if a RAID controller with some onboard cache could give SSDs good small-file performance.

Is this RAID card any good?

ddrueding · Mar 18, 2009

I bet it is. Areca cards were being compared favorably to 3Ware cards last I looked.

LunarMist · Mar 18, 2009

Do they support hot swap (power on/off) for individual drives? I would not be using arrays.
Is there any reason not to buy one other than obsolescence of SATA 2.0?

ddrueding · Mar 18, 2009

Dunno, but I'd imagine they would. You're wasting 70% of the cost if you aren't using arrays. Are you just looking at sticking 2GB of cache between slower SSDs and your system?

LunarMist · Mar 18, 2009

I should clarify intentions. For example, is it possible to have two SSD drives in RAID 0 and other single drives? How is the cache used exactly?

SSDs - State of the Product?

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