Re: SSD Performance Quesiton - How Much Faster that Spinning SAS

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 22:26, <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Judging by what some of the others said about xSeries - is SSD really all
that bleeding edge?

SSDs are bleeding edge technology everywhere. While the System x
environment has seen them in configurators quite a bit longer
(especially with bladecenters), noone actually used them.

Why? Because they were almost unusable up until around a year ago. And
all the big vendors are having trouble keeping up with the way the
market is developing. There are big performance improvements every few
months. A year ago, Intel sold you a 160GB consumer SSD for 900$. Now
the sell a 25% faster version for 400%.

Is SSD like a big freaking thumb drive? ÂHaven't those been out awhile?

They use the same base technology, but they're nowhere near the same.
Flash has been out for a while, but SSDs are much more sophisticated
than thumb drives. Thumb drives are awfully slow, especially after
you've used them for some time.

From what I read SSD doesn't have the write count that spinning disks

have. ÂIOW, they will wear out on writes before spinning disks will. ÂThey
compensate it by overengineering the write space and opening up some new
when some old ones are expired.

Having more space is also needed to compensate for possible speed
loss. TRIM is going to solve this, but i have no idea on how something
like TRIM is being implemented on SAS drives.

Either way, perhaps IBM is prepricing the
replacement costs on the purchase side? ÂAfter all, it's not like you pay
any more maintenance for SSD than you do for spinning disks.

Well, at 10'000$ per SSD they could keep a tech onsite to replace one
if it fails.