Drive confusion …

I’ve spent the last few weeks wandering around my region promoting 6Gb RAID cards and their benefits.

While it’s not the world’s most exciting promotion (speed changes is about it) it does show that resellers are now really struggling to work out which disks to use for which environment. Yes 6Gb is good, but does it really give you much more than the 3Gb product did?

In a lot of cases the answer seems to be no. However when dealing with large numbers of disks, streaming data or pure SSD environments the answers is a resounding: yes!

So where is the problem? I still find many resellers out there who don’t understand the differences in drive types, and the ramifications of using different drive types for different types of data. Almost everyone agrees that 6Gb SSD is the ducks guts … fantastic performance for not a huge outlay, but are they willing to build servers out of them yet? Basically no.

One of the major reasons seems to be the rapid changes in SSD development are not being well communicated to the end user … all they hear is figures about read speeds and not much else. Is that sustained?, burst?, something else? (they have no idea).

Is that 6Gb SATA drive really better than a 3Gb version? Can either saturate the data pipe to the card? No, but it does appear that 6Gb drives tend to have more cache on them in an effort to make them appear faster.

While we are on that subject … I’m amazed how many people I’ve found in the last three weeks who will turn the write cache off on the controller (to “protect their data”) and not even take drive cache into consideration. Well guess what … there is a large amount of data sitting out there at the end of the wire in cache, not protected by card cache protection practices - just hoping the UPS keeps it going until everything is written to the disk. Now that’s a good subject for another post.

So in the end what my travels have shown me is that people seem even more confused regarding what drives they should use for what environment than they were previously. Choice is a good thing, but only when the consumer is clearly informed of what impacts their choices have on their data. At the moment even I’m struggling to keep up with the drive guys … and their very somewhat confusing information streams.

Ciao
Neil