

Micron releases half-terabyte laptop SSDs - Bud
http://www.macworld.com/article/156849/2011/01/micron.html

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Periodic
_On average, the price of NAND flash memory drops 40 percent per year._

This is good news for databases. Flash drives have much better random access
performance than magnetic drives. With the price of these flash drives
dropping, it will soon be cost-effective to replace an entire database with
flash for the IOPS increase. Right now people are using flash for extra cache,
but soon we'll be able to fit the whole database in flash for a reasonable
$/IOPS.

It will extend the life of single-instance databases significantly, and mean
everyone can wait that much longer before distributing the database.

~~~
nphase
I recently replaced the SAS drives in all of my database servers with SSDs.
Watching IO wait on my usage graphs drop while db latency fell to near-0ms was
such an incredibly gratifying feeling. Worth every penny.

If you've got heavy random IO on your dataset (90% active, OLTP here) and/or
deal with any sort of significant contention or deadlocking across your disks,
I would strongly encourage upgrading to SSDs. Of course, if you can fit your
dataset into RAM, go that route. But if you're well past that point, might be
time to consider SSDs.[1]

[1] [http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/04/08/fast-ssd-
or-m...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/04/08/fast-ssd-or-more-
memory/)

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joevandyk
I wonder if Amazon's EBS will support SSD anytime soon. That would rock.

~~~
fredoliveira
It's quite impractical for them to "support" SSD. The way (I assume) their
infrastructure works would basically mean that the speedup you get from SSD
would be nullified by the rest of the IO needs imposed by their stack. That
is, if they were to simply move one service (in this case, EBS) to SSD.

The only way I see this happening is if they start adding servers with SSD,
where all services running on those servers support SSD too. This would
basically mean a separate cluster, fully based on SSD. I don't see this
happening soon.

~~~
lyime
They don't have to move to support EBS with SSD and mix and match. They could
have RDS instances with SSD only option and EBS based on SSD. They can charge
significant amount for those options, some might even pay for it.

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pjscott
"Half-terabyte": because "512 gigabyte" just doesn't sound as impressive.

Really, though, what I'm interested in is getting _enough_ SSD space at a
reasonable price. That might not make quite so eye-catching a headline,
though.

~~~
windsurfer
Actually, according to HD manufacturers, 0.5 TiB is roughly equal to 465.66
GB. That's a difference of almost 50GB.

~~~
alanh
I could be wrong but I think SSDs tend to come in actual powers of two, or
genuine 500GB

~~~
moe
SSDs have their own ways to shrink the physical capacity.

For example the new SandForce chipsets needed 20%(!) of the flash-capacity for
their scratch space when they were initially released. I think they have that
down to around 6% now.

However, regardless of the figures, the harddrive vendors have a user-base
that was trained for decades that harddrives are supposed to be smaller than
advertised. I doubt they will stop taking advantage of that.

~~~
icegreentea
It's not just scratch. It's also spare capacity and stuff to deal with level
wearing. They also advertise the actual usable space as opposed to the 'max'
space. A SSD might actually have 256GB of space, but it'll be advertised as
240GB. They're actually fairly honest.

Remember, most of the major SSD manufacturers -aren't- harddrive
manufacturers. They're chip and memory manufacturers (which makes sense).

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harshpotatoes
It's very cool that ssd's are getting the sizes to be able to replace my hard
drive rather than just be used in laptops or be used as a boot disk. Hopefully
the controller will be as fast as they claim and be competitive with intel and
OCZ. The only problem, is that as the manufacturicing process has shrunk (from
50nm, to 30nm, to now 25nm I think), the number of writes before the NAND
would no longer hold a charge has significantly decreased from 10000 to 5000
and downward. While these are still large enough for heavy use to last a few
years, hopefully these new drives will still be able to last a few years with
sustained use. Or at least, this is my current understanding of SSD tech.

~~~
ericd
I believe the high end Crucial drives use Sandforce controllers, which are
currently the top of the heap, and OCZ uses them in their best drives. Current
Sandforce controllers beat out the Intel G2, but I don't know how it's
supposed to stack up against the G3.

~~~
wmf
Crucial SSDs use a Marvell/Micron controller which does very well in many
benchmarks. [http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/the-ssd-diaries-
crucials-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/the-ssd-diaries-crucials-
realssd-c300)

~~~
ericd
Ahh thanks, that was the article I was trying to find last night but didn't
manage to.

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drinian
Almost certainly a response to the 600 gigabyte Intel SSDs that should be on
sale any day now.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/3965/intels-3rd-
generation-x25...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3965/intels-3rd-
generation-x25m-ssd-specs-revealed)

~~~
jim_h
It was supposed to be announced for 2010 Q4. Some think it might get delayed
until 2011 Q2. Best to wait to see if it gets announced at CES in a few days.

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javanix
I love watching a new technology go exponential. By this time next year we'll
be talking about 1TB laptop SSDs, and from there it won't be too long until
their capacities outpace platter tech.

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joevandyk
Anyone got any recommendations for SSDs for a MBP? Should I wait a few months
for one of the new ones?

I've got a 80GB SSD in my MBP, but it's feeling a little small.

The whole TRIM / garbage collection stuff got me feeling confused.

~~~
ComputerGuru
C300 by Crucial. I upgraded my 13" MBP with it a few months back (6? 8?) and
it's unbelievable. They say OS X doesn't _need_ TRIM, but I don't really
believe that.

Another option if you don't use your optical drive is to install a normal 2.5"
HD instead over there for not-oft-used data.

~~~
grk
Be careful - the shock protection for disks works only in the normal HDD bay -
put your SSD in optibay, not your HDD.

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CognitiveLens
I've read that putting your OS disk in the optibay can cause major problems
with resuming from sleep - has this been fixed, or do you just set it to "shut
down when lid is closed"?

