Solid State Disks (ssd's)

[klikster]

I just got a notification from my hosting company that they will be upgrading their mySQL servers (on HSphere) and mail servers to Solid State Disks. These guys are sort of a boutique hosting company with their own data center, and don't tend to be about hype. They claim

This is a rather significant technology (speed) and reliability upgrade as we will be transitioning from SCSI drives to 16 drive RAID 10 Solid State Disks (SSD's). These are chip/RAM based drives with no moving parts so reliability and speed are both greatly increased.

On the mySQL side, the performance should be increased by 2x at least and any slowdowns during backups should be minimized. While on the mail side, you'll probably see it speed up 5-10x if you use the webmail or IMAP options.

I have always assumed that SSD's are too expensive for my desktop. How viable would a setup be with most of my storage on a USB hard drive but with key files and OS on a SSD? Still too expensive?

I do very little gaming.

[quiksilva]

How important is speed to you?

SSD's are getting cheaper and are increasingly offer more storage space, but are still more expensive.

I have heard that they are very reliable and very very fast. Most people I know use small SSD's for the OS, with traditional hard drives used for bulk storage, mostly due to price, and even then these tend to be only what can be described as power users or serious gamers.

[verydumbubba]

Whats the question?!

Bubba

Edited July 29, 2009 by verydumbubba

[klikster]

Whats the question?!

Bubba

If you read my entire post and look very carefully you might just find it.

[klikster]

How important is speed to you?

That's sort of hard to answer and very difficult to quantify. I don't really have any specifics in mind. I also assume that the SSD's are more reliable. I have had any number of HDD failures and never had problems with RAM or flash drives.

SSD's are getting cheaper and are increasingly offer more storage space, but are still more expensive.

I have heard that they are very reliable and very very fast. Most people I know use small SSD's for the OS, with traditional hard drives used for bulk storage, mostly due to price, and even then these tend to be only what can be described as power users or serious gamers.

I did a bit of poking around after posting this and .. wow .. pretty expensive.

That setup (bold) is sort of what I had in mind. Probably a 60GB SSD and 320GB USB drive. Even at that, the 60 GB. Intel drive in the US is over $300. I have not been able to find them online here in Thailand.

I was hoping to read some first-hand reports from folks here in Thailand.

Edited July 30, 2009 by klikster

[stumonster]

the second generation intel x25m ssd's were launched in the last couple of weeks and are supposed to be quite cheap and speedy.

http://www.engadget.com/tag/intel+x25-m/

[namoo]

Really recommend the new Intels.

I have 2 in my Mac Pro Raid 0 and 2 in my macbook pro raid 0.

Performance is just stunning. Highly recommended and at $220 for a 80GB the price is good.

[klikster]

Another reason I'm looking at SSD's is that I'm thinking of getting a Notebook (not a netbook).

Although every notebook I have had in the past (Toshiba and Asus) died terribly expensive deaths because of proprietary (expensive) component failure. 1 keyboard, 1 battery, 1 hard drive, 1 "not sure" = junked the Asus.

Maybe time to try again.

[namoo]

Maybe time to try again.

The new macbook Pro 13" or 15" or 17" are what you are looking for. Best battery life in the industry and best build quality.

[jackdanielsesq]

If your Q&A addressed reliability, price, and acceptance in general, then the answer is 'who knows' Reliability is unknown.

It is definitely too early, and as of last week, the SSD was only mainstream in very few NB & Mac - mostly as options.

In RAID you have inbuilt redundancy, not so in ya NB. As NetBooks are mostly toys, data is not considered critical mass. Its a little like a good O/S -as soon as they perfect it, they change it all again, mostly to make more money.

HDD are so cheap and reliable its spooky.

To my knowledge, Google - the ultimate server-farmers, havent gone SSD - Lordy - if anyone can afford it, its them.

Watch the 'boutique' hoist their hosting real soon. Brand name would be interesting

BR>Jack

[klikster]

To my knowledge, Google - the ultimate server-farmers, havent gone SSD - Lordy - if anyone can afford it, its them.

Watch the 'boutique' hoist their hosting real soon. Brand name would be interesting

BR>Jack

From what I have read about Google, they are notorious for buying cheap equipment. Storage volume is also very important for them (how many billion pages indexed?) so HDD's seem more appropriate.

Re host, price has been stable for 3 years and there seems to be a tendency for hosting companies to trim prices rather than raise them. Lots of competition out there. imountain

[nikster]

To my knowledge, Google - the ultimate server-farmers, havent gone SSD - Lordy - if anyone can afford it, its them.

Watch the 'boutique' hoist their hosting real soon. Brand name would be interesting

BR>Jack

From what I have read about Google, they are notorious for buying cheap equipment. Storage volume is also very important for them (how many billion pages indexed?) so HDD's seem more appropriate.

Re host, price has been stable for 3 years and there seems to be a tendency for hosting companies to trim prices rather than raise them. Lots of competition out there. imountain

Google is a bad example, their whole philosophy is cheap hardware that will fail + smart software redundancy management that can compensate for hardware failures. They are incredibly proud of it. And it makes sense, because even if you get the very best hardware it will still fail at some point, particularly at a size that's big enough for Google.

As for why SSDs, please see here:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showd...?i=3607&p=4

The comparison shows two things: New Intel X-25 G2 SSDs kick some serious ass. And the very fastest hard drive known to man, the WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM is getting completely trounced even by the slower SSDs. In one graph, access time, they even left the HD out because its (measured) access time of 17ms was way out of range vs the SSDs from 0.2ms - 0.4ms.

And this is a hard drive that's a special desktop drive which is extremely loud and considered the fastest HD. It's way faster than any laptop hard drives you can find.

Personally, I am thinking about putting a small SSD (80GB for $225 for the new Intels, once they are out) plus a large 500GB HD in my laptop. I'll just remove the optical drive and replace it with a hard disk holding bracket. I never use the DVD anyway. Hard drives will still be around for a while because they are just much bigger and cheaper and if both SSDs and HDs improve at the same rate that they have, SSDs will catch up with HDs only in 2016 or something.

Edited July 30, 2009 by nikster

[klikster]

As for why SSDs, please see here:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showd...?i=3607&p=4

During my poking around, I had found a slightly earlier article (same website, same author) that had tons of "how they work" and "why they are fast" information. Much of it was over my head.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Anand is a pretty amazing tech resource

Today there is a notice on Daily Tech that suggests we will need to wait on the Intels.

A lot of excitement and demand has been built up for Intel's second generation SSDs which use 34nm NAND flash chips produced through a joint venture with Micron. There is a slight reduction in latency, but the big news at launch was the massive price cuts that Intel was introducing.

However, Intel has confirmed that it is delaying shipments of its new SSDs due to a data corruption issue affecting all of the new drives.

The problem occurs when a user sets a BIOS drive password on the new SSDs and then disables or changes the password. If the user powers off the computer, the drive will become inoperable and the data stored on it will remain inaccessible.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=15827

One thing all this has got me wondering. What will the prices be in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year?

[klikster]

I got a reminder yesterday about why I have been thinking of using SSD set up with " .. storage on a USB hard drive but with key files and OS on a SSD"

Something odd happened to my machine and I had to do a system restore .. no problem.

But I thought it was a good idea to run AV and anti-malware scans. So I had to wait for more than 2 hours for the scan to complete. I don't really like to leave my machine on overnight and I like to run daily AV scans.

How much faster should a virus scan on a SSD over a HDD be?

[jackdanielsesq]

Where do you go?!

BR>Jack

But I thought it was a good idea to run AV and anti-malware scans. So I had to wait for more than 2 hours for the scan to complete. I don't really like to leave my machine on overnight and I like to run daily AV scans.

[spacemunk]

I got a reminder yesterday about why I have been thinking of using SSD set up with " .. storage on a USB hard drive but with key files and OS on a SSD"

Something odd happened to my machine and I had to do a system restore .. no problem.

But I thought it was a good idea to run AV and anti-malware scans. So I had to wait for more than 2 hours for the scan to complete. I don't really like to leave my machine on overnight and I like to run daily AV scans.

How much faster should a virus scan on a SSD over a HDD be?

IMO not worth it to run a single SSD. The price for a single SSD i rather run veloraptors in raid.

[leftnose]

...

That setup (bold) is sort of what I had in mind. Probably a 60GB SSD and 320GB USB drive. Even at that, the 60 GB. Intel drive in the US is over $300. I have not been able to find them online here in Thailand.

...

IMO, still too expensive but here are dealers apparently selling them here:

JIB Computer: OCZ 80 % 120 GB size, current listed prices: 8,990 & 15,500 baht

Busitek: GSkill 64, 128, 256 GB size, current listed prices: 8,500, 14,500, & 24,300 baht

TK Computer: Same as Busitek, but also have GSkill 32GB (FS) for 12,900 baht

I haven't found the Intel SSDs here yet, but some dealer surely has them.

Worth a try I guess if you have the baht to burn.

[jackdanielsesq]

My concern has always been the wear-leveling or write-endurance problems that occur with this type of media and certain FS, as they constantly rewrite the same data many times per day to the same area, ergo life is reduced even further.

Which makes regular RAID HDD a way better proposition in server applications.

One wonders if their is any regular consumer application benefit, other than a moot talking point.

The current M$ FS were all designed for moving media storage & not solid state media.

Running daily AV scans, turning any electrical device on/off several times per day will reduce the MTBF by another 50%

Of course all the folks who claim >1.5m IOS probably have ulterior motives, whilst non of the biggies will take a free SSD?

Again, it is all in the application - ya dont need 64bit for cruising the Net.

BR>Jack

[namoo]

Got Intel SSD's at Jet (Corner store) in Fortune. No manufacturer has managed to compete with the Intel's in Random reads/writes. Overall the Intel's seem snappier to me I am guessing as an OS depends more on Random Reads/Writes than sequential.

I am using Intel SSD in Raid0 config in my macpro:

Disk Test 366.07

Sequential 231.96

Uncached Write 182.56 112.09 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 228.19 129.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 164.28 48.08 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 770.82 387.41 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 867.78

Uncached Write 883.37 93.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 425.19 136.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 2122.96 15.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 1527.95 283.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Also on my other machine Raid0 Vertex Gen2:

Disk Test 390.56

Sequential 314.41

Uncached Write 525.01 322.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 492.87 278.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 140.41 41.09 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 600.02 301.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 515.37

Uncached Write 195.85 20.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 658.03 210.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 2961.10 20.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 1253.18 232.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Edited August 6, 2009 by namoo

[newtronbom]

Hi all. There is a lot of talk from retailers and such, about these high performance solid state disks. Just thought I would put in a link to a "white paper" published by Texas memory systems, which details these performance gains. It is in PDF format. Will also add a link for a "performance tuning" paper from them as well. I found them to be good reading and they helped me understand many of the issues and variables associated with these SSDs

.

solid state drive performance

tuning solid state drives

One could argue that this is advertising hype from a company trying to sell a product, but I have read papers published by other sources and manufacturers on this subject and found their (Texas memory systems) claims and statistics to be supported by comparison with that other data. I hope this post helps a few of you out there, who are trying to make a decision on whether or not to fork out the big money and buy one of these SSDs. My Windows performance index is only 5.8, as it uses the lowest rating, which in my case is my hard drives. When I first installed Win 7 x64 Ultmt, I got a score of 6.5, but as I filled up my 1 TB of internal drives, the rating and of course the performance dropped. All my other scores are 7.2 and 7.3. I am now running some Autodesk 2011 stuff, for which you really need a "top of the line" high performance Desktop, to get the full benefits. The drop in performance is really hurting me. I read these papers to help me make an informed decision, on what best to buy. Hope my rambling post helps you. thebom

[nikster]

Got Intel SSD's at Jet (Corner store) in Fortune. No manufacturer has managed to compete with the Intel's in Random reads/writes. Overall the Intel's seem snappier to me I am guessing as an OS depends more on Random Reads/Writes than sequential.

Not true anymore, the OWC Mercury Extreme is the current king of the hill, with a price tag to match

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce

It shows absolutely zero performance degradation over time, probably thanks to its 20% buffer reserved for performance optimization. Which also makes it more expensive than other drives. But if I were to buy a new one, that would be the one I'd get.

I have an Intel X-25M in my MacBook Pro. And yes there's no going back. Everything is instant with this drive. My MacBook Pro feels way faster than an 8-core Mac Pro desktop. I replaced my optical drive with an 80GB SSD for system and apps, and my work, and kept a 500GB HD for cheap large storage in the HD bay. Now, 80GB is a little small, I'd go for 160+ next time around. I don't think you need to research a lot about HD vs SSD - the difference is obvious, and HUGE.

The only problem with many SSD designs is that they get slower as they fill up and/or as they get older. The above mentioned SSD solves that problem for good, and I imagine future designs will as well. I just would stay away from an unknown SSD unless and until there is a comprehensive time-performance test out there. In one time-trial test I read, some SSDs started out with 200MB/s transfer rates on random read, but degraded to less than 1MB/s within a few complete write cycles. So you'd end up with a SSD that's not much faster than a HD.

My opinion on "tuning" performance for your drives - a waste of time. If I need to tune my drive, it doesn't work properly. The drive should be a black box that works without me having to do anything special. The Mercury Extreme Pro proves that that's possible.

Edited September 18, 2010 by nikster

[newtronbom]

Got Intel SSD's at Jet (Corner store) in Fortune. No manufacturer has managed to compete with the Intel's in Random reads/writes. Overall the Intel's seem snappier to me I am guessing as an OS depends more on Random Reads/Writes than sequential.

Not true anymore, the OWC Mercury Extreme is the current king of the hill, with a price tag to match

http://eshop.macsale...e_SSD_Sandforce

It shows absolutely zero performance degradation over time, probably thanks to its 20% buffer reserved for performance optimization. Which also makes it more expensive than other drives. But if I were to buy a new one, that would be the one I'd get.

I have an Intel X-25M in my MacBook Pro. And yes there's no going back. Everything is instant with this drive. My MacBook Pro feels way faster than an 8-core Mac Pro desktop. I replaced my optical drive with an 80GB SSD for system and apps, and my work, and kept a 500GB HD for cheap large storage in the HD bay. Now, 80GB is a little small, I'd go for 160+ next time around. I don't think you need to research a lot about HD vs SSD - the difference is obvious, and HUGE.

The only problem with many SSD designs is that they get slower as they fill up and/or as they get older. The above mentioned SSD solves that problem for good, and I imagine future designs will as well. I just would stay away from an unknown SSD unless and until there is a comprehensive time-performance test out there. In one time-trial test I read, some SSDs started out with 200MB/s transfer rates on random read, but degraded to less than 1MB/s within a few complete write cycles. So you'd end up with a SSD that's not much faster than a HD.

My opinion on "tuning" performance for your drives - a waste of time. If I need to tune my drive, it doesn't work properly. The drive should be a black box that works without me having to do anything special. The Mercury Extreme Pro proves that that's possible.

Think I will wait for the price to come down. Awesome drive though. Thanks for the info.

[wpcoe]

I read someplace that after the first feeling of awe when you start using a system with an SSD drive, you get used to it to the point that when you subsequently use a system with a standard HDD, you can't believe how slow it is. I've found that to be quite true. My SSD on my home desktop system has spoiled me. And, it's a low end Kingston drive.