Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat - Latest Comments in Commercial SSDs Are Here?

Re: Commercial SSDs Are Here?

james braselton — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:56:08 -0000

HI THERE YOU ARE RIGHT THE BIGER THE BLOCK THE LONGER IT WILL WORK BECUASE IT HAS MORE DATA SOO A 4 KB BLOCK WILL WERE OUT BEORE A 4 MB BLOCK AND A 4 GB BLOCK WILL LAST THE LONGEST

Re: Commercial SSDs Are Here?

dave_graham — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 10:41:45 -0000

Stephen,

definitely interesting points on the power consumption end. I'm curious to see the positioning of SSDs versus the 2.5" Enterprise drive push we're seeing from Seagate, et al. right now. Obviously, capacities are somewhat limited on the 2.5" drives, but slowly, capacity parity is being reached (250GB SATA drives were announced by Hitachi and Fujitsu recently). Obviously, 10k/15k spindle units will have more power draw than the 7.2K SATA units but, i suspect, when the I/O per watt breakdown is considered, these drives might be more efficient than SSDs.

cheers,

Dave

Re: Commercial SSDs Are Here?

sfoskett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 10:27:08 -0000

Good point, Dave. These things were announced and "shipped" almost a year ago now - from many companies. I posted this because I saw one myself, which I suppose makes it more real to me! :)

As for power, note that the SATA interface takes up half a watt on its own, vastly reducing the power and heat benefits over spinning media. Put it on SAS and it's even worse! True, the chips are efficient, but the interface isn't.

Which leads me to assume that any enterprise use of NAND will be in a proprietary form, not a commercial interface like SATA.

Thanks for reading and posting!

Re: Commercial SSDs Are Here?

dave_graham — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:59:25 -0000

oh, a tertiary point (Gosh, I wish there was an edit button) to your article.

SSDs also consume dramatically less power per I/O than convential disk (obviously) and with power being a continual focus at EMC and other companies, it does play very handily into that message.

and for the novelty side of things, may i present the Gigabyte Go-Ramdisk-box? (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7563).

cheers,

Dave

Re: Commercial SSDs Are Here?

dave_graham — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:53:50 -0000

Steve, longtime reader here and finally got around to registering.

Just a couple of quick notes. Adtron actually debuted their SSD solutions before PQI and SanDisk (http://www.dailytech.com/Adtron+Announces+160GB...) with PQI stating they were going to bring 256GB devices to the market. It's all marketing, for sure, as channel availability is absolutely abysmal and cost factors per GB are exhorbitantly high.

Also during the past couple of years, I was fortunate enough to have Van Smith (VIA EPIA platform engineer) provide a FileCopy utility that allowed me to generate scalable file size (text) and do as many reads/writes from source to target as possible. It's a great tool for judging the longevity of SSD devices (or NAND in general).

Anyhow, thought those were interesting side points! Keep up the good work!

cheers,

Dave