Re: SSD + RAID

On Thu, 19 Nov 2009, Greg Smith wrote:
> This is why turning the cache off can tank performance so badly--you're going
> to be writing a whole 128K block no matter what if it's force to disk without
> caching, even if it's just to write a 8K page to it.

Theoretically, this does not need to be the case. Now, I don't know what
the Intel drives actually do, but remember that for flash, it is the
*erase* cycle that has to be done in large blocks. Writing itself can be
done in small blocks, to previously erased sites.

The technology for combining small writes into sequential writes has been
around for 17 years or so in
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=146943&dl= so there really isn't any
excuse for modern flash drives not giving really fast small writes.

Matthew

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