roboto4k writes:
> i agree. oh and for the record i was speaking of sata SSDs. i have
> no experience with the PCIe RAM drives. those are actually becoming
> affordable now. ...
Indeed, PCIe SSDs just push the performance numbers even higher.
Then there are FC/IB connected devices which scale to crazy levels, eg.
I know someone who runs a RamSan620 which does over 250K IOPS for 4K
random (3GB/sec read and 2GB/sec write sequential), and this is an
older model. Very expensive, but the performance is ideal for their
needs (movie company; perfect for database indices, logs, metadata, etc.)
> ... i dont know how reliable they will be after a couple of years. ...
Early products, especially those aimed at the 'prosumer' market, had
a mixed reputation, but they've improved a lot. Now of course there
are numerous Enterprise models with high reliability features. There's
really no need for any ordinary user to have a PCIe SSD though, the
gains over a standard good SATA model would be minimal and barely
noticeable. My own tests showed what any review will confirm - the biggest
difference is in having any kind of SSD at all; beyond that, the differences
between the various models of SSD are less significant, something PCMark7
shows quite nicely even when synthetic bench numbers may vary somewhat more.
> my original point was really about performance vs gb per dollar. ...
True, but I'm sure some would point out the obvious risks with RAID0.
One bad drive and you've lost the lot (backups are key for avoiding
sleepless nights with RAID0). This is why I much prefer RAID10, ie.
combine the speed of RAID0 with the redundancy of RAID1. My 3930K AE
setup has 4 x 2TB Enterprise SATA in RAID10. I personally wouldn't
risk consumer SATA in RAID0 (thus, before I obtained the Enterprise
SATA drives, I was using 4x 600GB 15K SAS).
> Porn for me is listening to my array rip through massive video files
> like a chainsaw. my killer app is video conversion; taking peoples
> decade old analog tapes that have been sitting in their garage and
> digitizing, scrubbing, and editing them. IT IS an artform. ...
I have a similar project on the go, more than a thousand documentaries
on VHS to digitise.
> takes serious cpu and hard drive space. i would never switch to ssd
> for that purpose.
You probably don't need to. Video conversion is mostly larger size
transfers and, depending on the type of conversion, may not benefit
from the performance potential of SSDs, especially since the bottleneck
during processing is much more likely to be the main CPU (tests might
show a moderate gain with SSDs, but not as much as just having more CPU
power instead). This is certainly the case if you're editing with Flame
(I have an SGI Tezro for that, and a 16-CPU Onyx350 with Inferno).
However, the general responsiveness, etc. of any system will be better
with an SSD as the system drive. At a minimum, even moving the virtual
memory onto an SSD can help. For AE, it makes a huge difference to have
the AE cache on an SSD, but that's because of the way AE works.
> my first few SSDs that i bought a few years ago have degraded to the
Older models certainly suffered in various ways, and early 4K write
performance was poor in some cases. That's all been fixed now. Much
improved designs. It's a different field today entirely.
> point that they are no faster than 250 gb HDDs. ...
Secure erase should fix that, unless of course the write endurance has
been used up.
Older models did not have the overall capacity to allow for much
over-provisioning, whereas newer models have plenty, and manufacturers
often include a lot of extra capacity anyway, eg. a 256GB SSD might have
well over 300GB actual Flash inside. This is why I waited for SSDs to
reach at least 60GB before buying them, by which time they'd matured
quite a bit and I found the improvements well worth the investment,
speeds more than doubled for the tasks I have to do many times a day,
eg. searching my email archive (which is not on a PC btw, hence the
speedup being limited to a 100% improvement, system in question is an
older UNIX machine with U160 SCSI and an LSI 3442X-R SAS card). Eventually
I upgraded my gaming PC to SSDs (120GB Vertex3 for boot drive, 120GB
Vertex3 MAX IOPS for game data) and that really did help with level
loading, etc.
> i am aware of the newwer technology that prevents this on high end
Much of this tech is now on all modern models, though with certain
exceptions. I avoid the cheaper obscure brands.
> ... in addition the overall failure rate of mainstream SSDs is
> still too high right now.
Peoples' experiences of this seem to vary wildly. I have loads of them
and so far not one of them has gone wrong. I think many don't bother
updating the firmware when they first buy a drive, which is a mistake.
> im not one to crack open the wallet for bleeding edge technology but
Nor me. I bag them off eBay whenever I can.
In the past week I've
won a Samsung 840 Pro 128GB (new), Samsung 840 Pro 512GB (new), OCZ
Vertex4 128GB (refurb), and a few others.
> dont get me wrong now. my wifes gaming whitebook will have dual SSDs
> in RAID 10 but thats a laptop. ...
I assume you mean RAID1. RAID10 would require at least four devices.
> ... and shhh, dont tell her. its for xmas.
I wouldn't dare.
Btw, here's some tests I did earlier this year with a SATA2-based P55 setup:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/ssd_tests.txt
Not done the same tests with a SATA3 setup yet though (which of course
should show even larger speedups for some of the SSDs), not had the time.
Also have a bunch of new models not yet included (Samsung 840 Pro 128/256/512,
Vector 256GB, Vertex4 128/256, etc.) Never enough hours in the day... :}
Ian.
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