Re: Intel SSDs that may not suck

The potential breakthrough here with the 320 is consumer grade SSD
performance and price paired with high reliability.

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Andy <angelflow(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:
> This might be a bit too little too late though. As you mentioned there really isn't any real performance improvement for the Intel SSD. Meanwhile, SandForce (the controller that OCZ Vertex is based on) is releasing its next generation controller at a reportedly huge performance increase.
>
> Is there any benchmark measuring the performance of these SSD's (the new Intel vs. the new SandForce) running database workloads? The benchmarks I've seen so far are for desktop applications.
>
> Andy
>
> --- On Mon, 3/28/11, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> From: Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com>
>> Subject: [PERFORM] Intel SSDs that may not suck
>> To: "pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org" <pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org>
>> Date: Monday, March 28, 2011, 4:21 PM
>> Today is the launch of Intel's 3rd
>> generation SSD line, the 320 series.  And they've
>> finally produced a cheap consumer product that may be useful
>> for databases, too!  They've put 6 small capacitors
>> onto the board and added logic to flush the write cache if
>> the power drops.  The cache on these was never very
>> big, so they were able to avoid needing one of the big
>> super-capacitors instead.  Having 6 little ones is
>> probably a net reliability win over the single point of
>> failure, too.
>>
>> Performance is only a little better than earlier generation
>> designs, which means they're still behind the OCZ Vertex
>> controllers that have been recommended on this list.  I
>> haven't really been hearing good things about long-term
>> reliability of OCZ's designs anyway, so glad to have an
>> alternative.  *Important*:  don't buy SSD for
>> important data without also having a good redundancy/backup
>> plan.  As relatively new technology they do still have
>> a pretty high failure rate.  Make sure you budget for
>> two drives and make multiple copies of your data.
>>
>> Anyway, the new Intel drivers fast enough for most things,
>> though, and are going to be very inexpensive.  See http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_320_review_300gb
>> for some simulated database tests.  There's more about
>> the internals at http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review
>> and the white paper about the capacitors is at http://newsroom.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/38-4324/Intel_SSD_320_Series_Enhance_Power_Loss_Technology_Brief.pdf
>>
>> Some may still find these two cheap for enterprise use,
>> given the use of MLC limits how much activity these drives
>> can handle.  But it's great to have a new option for
>> lower budget system that can tolerate some risk there.
>>
>> -- Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US
>> greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com   Baltimore,
>> MD
>> PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support
>> www.2ndQuadrant.us
>> "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books
>>
>>
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