In a spin about not spinning …

In a spin about not spinning …

I hope people appreciate how long it takes me to come up with these snappy headlines.

Just spent a few days at Computex in Taiwan … wading through a mountain of new equipment, motherboards, memory modules and especially, importantly and all-pervasively … Solid State Drives (SSDs).

They were everywhere. It seems that there are thousands of these things on the market, ranging from well-known to never heard of. Of course, they are flavour of the month and have a very large target audience, but it was amazing to see how many brands are on the market.

Now my focus is on storage, especially in the server arena. While I would have loved someone to give me one of these babies for my laptop that didn’t seem to happen, so I whiled away my time asking questions of these manufacturers. Now to be fair, there were a lot of very pretty young ladies trying to sell product whom I don’t think were product experts, but there were also the supposed “product experts” hanging around the back of the stand trying not to be bored to death by several hundred thousand tyre-kickers, so there was knowledge there if you asked hard enough questions.

Now what sort of questions would be “hard” questions for the SSD industry? Simply (a) are you using SLC or MLC technology, (b) what are your performance figures and (c) how long do you expect this drive to last in my laptop and an average database server (maybe a 50-user SQL environment).

Question A generally drew some blank looks, but reading the tech specs found the answer (which was, to a very large degree, MLC). Question B was easy … everyone has amazing figures on display (take all with a dose of salt) so there’s no shortage of amazing claims out there.

Question C had people running for cover. “Oh, we are not targetting the server market” was the well-practiced standard response by most manufacturer’s representatives. However when we got to discussing their view of the future drive market, all seemed of the opinion that SSD would certainly take over the SAS market, and that SATA would come under threat as the size of SSD increases and the price comes down.

Great, so I want to build a database server. Yesterday I would have used 4 x 15K RPM SAS drives in a RAID 10 configuration to get my best combination of read and write performance (especially on small writes) and pretty-well-sorted reliability. Today the “new age” drive industry would have me using 4 x SSD drives in the same config with amazing IOP and throughput figures.

So I build my system with SSD … how long will it last? I am aware of the long write-life of SLC technology, but it also has an amazing cost involved, so many people will not use those drives, but drop for what seem a better bargain (which happen to be MLC drives). Now I don’t believe MLC has anywhere near the write life of SLC, so exactly how long will this server last before things start going terribly wrong with my storage.

With my SAS investment I could easily expect 3 years, and more likely 5 years good use (on average) from my expensive, hot, expensive to run and heavy SAS drives, but what will MLC give me? That one I could not get an answer for.

Now the SSD drive experts and manufacturers out there will read this and immediately start yelling at me that I’m using the drive out of it’s intended target usage pattern, and that I should be using SLC technology, however these are the same people telling customers that they should use SSD for everything and omitting the relatively important information about drive life when selling the product and making amazing claims to customers about size and speed, glossing over the underlying technology questions.

Don’t get me wrong … I think SSD is great, it’s here to stay and I want one sooner rather than later, but there are a lot of variables out there with these drives, and Joe Public doesn’t seem to have much of a clue.

It’s either “buyer beware” or do your research first.

Ciao
Neil