
Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives - alexandros
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-state-hard-drives.html
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gjm11
There's not really very much revisiting, as opposed to repetition. What's new:
(1) Atwood recommends the Crucial RealSSD C300 (citing a couple of reviews).
(2) Seagate have a reasonably priced hybrid SSD/spinning-rust drive, the
Momentus XT, which according to AnandTech has good performance. (It uses 4GB
of flash as a read cache; performance is intermediate between typical HD and
typical SSD.)

~~~
ergo98
It's a revisited taxation on a gullible readership, many affiliate links there
covering all budget points.

My PC has both a standard, non-hybrid magnetic disk for volume, and a very,
very fast SSD for speed. I use the SSD for development and, humorously, Steam
games. It's nice, but given that I have 8GB of RAM and most everything I touch
regularly is cached...and I virtually never turn my PC entirely off (S3 sleep
is your friend)...outside of database tests it just doesn't make that much of
a difference.

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healsdata
Interesting. I didn't notice the affiliate links the first time and then when
I did look, I saw domain names like kqzyfj.com. What purpose does it serve to
hide the fact that it's an affiliate link behind a disposable domain name? Are
there things like Firefox extensions that would search for
"commissionjunction.com" and replace it with non-affiliate links?

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ergo98
I always look for affiliate links when bloggers suddenly start shilling
merchandise outside of their competency.

I don't mind when there's an obvious "best prices" DIV at the bottom or
wherever, where its purpose and commercial motivation is obvious, but embedded
affiliate links just feel....scummy.

It's like getting invited to dinner and the host starts an Amway pitch. It
colours the entire presentation.

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jacquesm
> It's like getting invited to dinner and the host starts an Amway pitch.

I respond in the same way, I leave, never to return.

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Herring
Maybe try not attending dinners titled "revisiting Amway products". Just a
suggestion.

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bconway
Decent article, but out of date by a few months. None of the drives listed use
the newer SandForce controller, which skyrockets sequential writes into the
275 MB/s range, and random writes into 50K IOPS. _These_ drives are where it's
at (for home/commodity use, etc).

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Zev
The Crucial RealSSD C300 drive he cites has a theoretical max of 355MB/s. I
happen to have have this drive. Writes comes close to 150MB/s at times, after
a month and a half of use on OS X (which apparently lacks TRIM). Thats not too
shabby.

Here's an Xbench result from about a month and a half ago (when I first got
it) and one for today (as of 10:36am est):
[http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=459679&doc2=469412...](http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=459679&doc2=469412&setCookie=true)

~~~
catch23
It only has that max if you happen to have a sata 3 compatible host, otherwise
you'll be downgraded back to sata 2 and your speed will be comparable to
everyone else.

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stuff4ben
Was surprised to hear OSX doesn't support TRIM. Does anyone know why? I was
gettin all excited about getting a new SSD for my MBP, but now I'm not so
sure...

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alanh
As a commenter pointed out, it seems that TRIM is not needed, in practice, on
OS X. [http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-
pe...](http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe..). As a
MacBook Pro user who has had an SSD for a few months now — with a very full
drive, frequent media file rotation, git repos, etc., I have not noticed any
slowdown. And yes, it was worth it.

~~~
jeffffff
that link is a bad test. they wrote 0's to the drive, which is bad because 1)
empty nand flash contains all 1's and 2) writing 1's or 0's doesn't mark the
blocks as cleared, you have to use secure erase

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ssmoot
I used to know OCZ as a bit of a shady, benchmark gaming outfit "back in the
day". Today however, the SandForce based Vertex II Pro SSDs are amazing. 10K+
IOPs sustained with a genuine database load. 100GB for just over $600. Compare
that with STEC Mach8 devices at ten times the price, not super-capacitor
backed, and lower throughput.

Sure a couple JBODs stacked with 15K RPM disks could do the same for $50K...
Now imagine a small single-parity array of four SandForce devices. ;-)

For most things, meh. But for databases, it's a real game changer. 2010 is
definitely the year SSDs changed everything.

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seunosewa
Did anyone else notice that the performance of the Seagate Momentus XT is
_awful_ compared to all the solid state drives? It's only about 20% faster
than a regular hard disk drive (the SSDs are about 1000% faster, according to
Jeff's own chart). It's an awful, awful recommendation. If you want the
performance of a solid state drive, buy a solid state drive.

~~~
Splines
It'd be nice if there existed a thing that acted like the SSD part of the
Seagate Momentus XT. That way I could hybrid-ize my existing drives and have
greater flexibility for future upgrades.

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nitrogen
There's the HDDBOOST, from SilverStone, though it almost sounds like you were
just begging someone to link to it ;)

Some benchmarks:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=silve...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=silverstone_hddboost_re&num=1)

~~~
Splines
Hrm. I was hoping that such a device would perform better.

Yeah, I _was_ hoping someone would link something. In this case, I didn't
really know what I was looking for. What do you call a doohickey that does
that sort of thing?

~~~
nitrogen
I'm not personally aware of any specific name for it, but I used search terms
in the neighborhood of "SSD hybrid adapter" to find the Phoronix article.

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newsisan
I would disagree about not needing >2GB of ram, but other than that - SSDs
rock.

~~~
someone_here
On my Ubuntu machine, I rarely use more than 1GB (apart from the disk cache,
of course, which can fill all remaining memory. Note: windows only has an 8MB
cache)

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jerf
On my Kubuntu machine with 4GB, I rarely use more than 1.5GB of RAM, and
that's _counting_ the disk cache which will grow to fill all available space.
Unless I run a VM, the system literally has no use for half my RAM, except for
dual-channel access.

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bengl3rt
I have the 2010 Mac Pro @ 3.33GHz. Going from the WD Caviar Black that it
ships with to two SATA SSDs (60GB each, one for Boot and one for Apps) and one
PCI SSD (120GB, for scratch work) has been unbelievable. This was a fast
computer to begin with, but now I literally never find an application waiting
on the disk. Xcode builds that take several minutes on my laptop (copying lots
of resources into the bundle, for example) complete in seconds on the new
machine. Highly recommended.

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StavrosK
Does anyone know how to get Linux to support TRIM? I just reformatted my SSD
and would hate for it to become slower just because of deallocated blocks.

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nuclear_eclipse
According to the linked wikipedia page on the TRIM command, Linux has
supported it "since Feb 2010", so I would imagine that anything running the
2.6.32 kernel would correctly utilize that feature if your drive supports it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

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limist
Looks like you'd need the Linux 2.6.33 kernel:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM#Operating_system_support>
[http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=51105](http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=51105)

~~~
jolan
It also requires filesystem support. ext4 was the first support it.

I believe btrfs, nilfs2, and xfs support it now as well.

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olegk
C300 is definitely NOT the fastest SSD drive. There are a few that are much
much faster.

1) FusionIO ioXtreme = 670/280 MB/s

2) FusionIO ioDrive = 770/750 MB/s, 140,000 IOPS

3) FusionIO ioDrive Duo = 1500/1500 MB/s, 261,000 IOPS

4) RamSan-440 = 4 GB/s, 600,000 IOPS

5) NextIO vSTOR S100 = 5.5/6 GB/s, 2,200,000 IOPS

There are many more listed here: <http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-
fastest.html>

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ojbyrne
These are either rack-mounted or PCIe drives. If I look at the chart on that
page, then the C300 is the fastest 2.5 inch SATA drive. I.e. its the fastest
drive that can practically be added to a laptop.

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Revisor
Tangential: Does anyone have experience with using SSDs in production web/DB
servers? Is it viable (yet)?

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MichaelApproved
MySpace replaced all their fast hd's with SSDs about a year ago with good
results
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139280/MySpace_repla...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139280/MySpace_replaces_all_server_hard_disks_with_flash_drives)

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mhb
I don't understand the reasoning about not wanting to put a relatively
expensive SSD in a relatively cheap laptop.

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MartinCron
I've got an expensive SSD in my cheap laptop (free, actually, it was the one
they gave me at Microsoft PDC 2009) and it really makes a huge difference.
This cheap little laptop, with the SSD, hooked up to a huge monitor, is one of
the best dev environments I've ever used.

