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Intel's First SSD Blows Doors Off Competition
theraindog writes "Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."
My SBDs will blow THEIR doors off.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Those're STDs.
A step in the right direction, but at $600 per 1000 I am gonna wait a bit longer before jumping on the SSD bandwagon.
This article at HotHardware, has a few additional tests that show real-world usage models as well as synthetic benchmarks: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/
The PCMark Vantage tests are especially impressive: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/?page=7
You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
This is great and all, but if I had to choose, give me more SSD storage. It's got plenty of speed right now, I'll be impressed when SSDs can be an actual alternative to disks.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
This review at HotHardware shows some additional data including a few additional real-world usage models, like PCMark Vantage tests: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/
Benchmarks start here: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/?page=4
Since SSD don't really have "sectors", do they fragment files the same way as HDD?
Also, what would the defrag speeds be?
That depends entirely on what kind of RAID we're talking about...
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
If anyone's seen the results, it's in first place in speed but not in a "door blowing manner". It's just slightly faster than the next guy.
Pardon me, but it is "blowing down the doors" (and the house too) in some tests, like this one. More than 3x the number of transactions of the second fastest flash drive? 7x faster than the slowest SSD drive? And the traditional HDDs are so crushed at the bottom I can't make out a ratio, but 30x or more? That is just ownage of the highest level. Yes, the write speeds aren't exactly compelling but for IO and read-heavy uses it's completely mindblowing.
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Yeah, but the reason it speeds up mechanical hard drives is because your kernel can schedule I/O on multiple spindles, effectively parallelizing your I/O. Flash chips don't have to batch up a lot of transactions in memory and then block the process for long periods of time. Flash does not typically operate synchronous to the bus speed it's connected to, so you could get some speed benefits by accessing multiple banks in tandem, but probably not as much.
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With more PS3 games offering an "install-to-HD" option, I wonder how SSD would affect performance. My theory is that playing a console game is a read-heavy experience, so an SSD should do quite well, right? Any rich gamers out there that have tried this out yet?
Pardon me, but it is "blowing down the doors" (and the house too)
Yes, the write speeds aren't exactly compelling but for IO and read-heavy uses it's completely mindblowing
Great, first the doors, then the house and now your mind...
I guess if there's anything we've learned is this drive really blows.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Probably right next to the dlsyexia tag.
What would be interesting would be to put an Oracle database block interface on these puppies, instead of the normal filesystem interface. then you'd just have the database say to the storage "get me block X" and it appears. No filesystem overheads - which given the speed of these things could turn out to be significant.
Looks like we'll be back on RAW "disks" for databases. Plus ca change!
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I get a little tired of hearing about how the price has to drop orders of magnitude before SSD is viable. Shop around a little people!
I ended up buying a refurb Dell laptop for around $1000 with a 64 gig SSD. Was it the latest and greatest? Nope. But it was about $150/200 more than a similarly priced computer with a traditional drive (which of course, was larger). Since the only significant problems I've ever had with my two prior Dell laptops (admittedly a small sample) involved the hard drive, going with the SSD (especially when you include the "cool" factors -- both temperature and nerd-ism) was an easy decision.
But the point is that as SSDs become more prevalent, they become available at cheaper prices. I'm sure that as the Intel drives are rolled out, the "obsolete" drives currently on the market will continue to fall in price and become available to bottom-dwelling cheap-o-s like me who may not be able to justify $1000, but can rationalize $200 without a whole lot of difficulty.
If you read the article, NCQ actually makes sense. The Intel drive actually finishes requests before the CPU gets around to asking "are you done yet?". That time between the drive finishing and the drive being told what to do next is spent idle. By supporting NCQ, the drive can convince the CPU to send large batches of commands and get rid of that latency.
It's faster for the same reason that FTP is faster than IRC DCC. FTP just keep sending bytes as long as the other end doesn't close the connection. IRC DCC sends a packet, waits for a reply, sends the next packet, and so on.
Those're STDs.
It burns when I read/write
The preferred spelling is lysdexia.
Here's my concern in a nutshell:
Assuming a degenerate workload, with a naive algorithm that never remaps existing data except when it is written, death is swift. Assume a 256 KB flash block. Assume a 4 GB flash device with 2% spare. Assume 70 MB/sec. transfer rate. Assume TCQ/NCQ so that you can queue up requests without waiting for the previous request to complete. At 2%, you have about 81.92 MB of spares, or about 328 spares. You have to erase a block containing 256KB at once (one entire flash block). Write random data on a single data block over and over without caching. At 70 MB/sec. divided by a 256 KB block, you can write 280 blocks per second. That comes to about 1.17 seconds to go through all of the spares once. With a 10,000 erasure limit, that means you destroy all the spares in 2.38 hours. At that point, no further writes can occur because erasing and rewriting a block in place is inherently unsafe. Obviously for a 60 GB disk, multiply the numbers by 15. Even with 100,000 cycle flash, one could kill a drive with a naive algorithm in about four months. Okay, so it wouldn't be quite that fast because you'd have to issue write cache flush instructions between each write, but you're in the ballpark.
On the flip side, with a typical workload, a drive would likely last several years even with such a naive algorithm. This is why I'm concerned. It is quite possible for a company to implement a remarkably naive wear leveling algorithm and mostly get away with it except for a few unlucky people who end up with data loss. We saw this in the HD industry not too long ago with IBM claiming after the fact that their drives were not designed for continuous use. With such a history of reliability corner-cutting from storage vendors, I think there's good reason to expect better transparency from the flash drive vendors about how they are doing wear leveling, particularly if these products are expected to be used in enterprise installations as this drive supposedly is. Fool me once and all that....
I won't even get into the question of how one can possibly achieve anything approaching a 1.1 write amplification rate short of building custom flash chips that allow per-page erasure.... Maybe for certain synthetic workloads, but not for a degenerate workload (e.g. write blocks sequentially with a stride length of the same size as (or larger than) the physical flash block size until you exceed the capacity of the write cache, rinse, repeat).... Otherwise, that seems at least an order of magnitude lower than is plausible. I'd have to see white papers explaining exactly how they're doing this miraculously good wear leveling before I'd trust any low-cycle-count SSDs in anything resembling a production server....
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