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the Problem with Write IOPS
Editor:- December 16, 2009 - StorageSearch.com published a new article - the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs.

Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the fastest SSDs. So why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?

And why are users still buying RAM SSDs which cost 9x more than SLC? - even when the IOPS specs look similar.
the problem with flash SSD write IOPS This new article tells you why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely differently. ...read the article
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read the article about SSD integrity written by SandForce
Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design
Editor:- October 16, 2009 - StorageSearch.com recently published a new article called - Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design - written by Kent Smith Senior Director, Product Marketing, SandForce.

Since bursting onto the SSD scene in April 2009, SandForce has achieved remarkably high reader popularity. How did a company whose business is designing SSD controllers achieve this? - especially when the direct market for its products today numbers less than 1,000 oems.

The answer is - that if you want to know what the future of 2.5" enterprise SATA SSDs might look like -you have to look at the leading technology cores that will affect this market. Even if you're not planning to use SandForce based products yourself - you can't afford to ignore them - because they are setting the agenda.

Reliability is the next new thing for SSD designers and users to start worrying about.
read the article about SSD integrity A common theme you will hear from all fast SSD companies is that the faster you make an SSD go - the more effort you have to put into understanding and engineering data integrity to eliminate the risk of "silent errors." ...read the article
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How Much Hay Has Your Car Been Eating Lately?

Calling for an End to Unrealistic SSD vs HDD IOPS Comparisons

Editor:- I've been publishing articles about the SSD market for over a decade - so maybe that's why something in my brain snapped yesterday (May 28, 2008) - when I was reading yet another new article from an SSD vendor about the server acceleration which you could get from their product.

Because the only competition it mentioned was hard drives.

Enough is enough! - I said.

I can't remember whether the article claimed their product was 300x or 500x faster in random IOPS than a 15K SAS hard drive - but as the IOPS in a hard drive haven't changed much since the appearance of the first 15K RPM products in EMC's CLARiiON systems in 2002, and as there may never be a 20K RPM drive... The long and the short of it is that every month the fastest SSDs get better - while the fastest hard drives remain exactly as fast as they were. So the HDD versus SSD random IOPS gap gets wider. We haven't learned anything new!

I'm not denying that these comparisons have been useful in the past. And they are still useful when a single 2.5" SSD for example is being compared with a single 2.5" hard drive. But as I wrote in an article in 2003 when you're looking at what a fast rackmount SSD can do for you - you should be calculating how many servers you can save / or would need to add to get to the same 3x application speedup - not how many disks.

It's understandable that people refer new products to an assumed common frame of reference.

I'm sure that a century ago when the first car owners were talking to their neighbors - they must have made comparisons like - how much faster they were than a horse.

"It's amazing. Unlike my old horse my new car doesn't get tired. And I don't need pasture or hay to make it go - just a few bottles of gas."

And you didn't get the same stinking mess in the city streets either. (At the time the Sherlock Holmes stories were being published in the Strand Magazine in 1892 - there was a "green" market carting horse dung out of London to stop the streets becoming impassable.)

I think I'm safe in assuming that the last time you bought a car - you didn't compare its speed or fuel consumption to a horse. Am I right?

No - of course not. You compared it to other cars.

It's a sign of a maturing market when there are enough products around to compare them to each other, instead of comparing them to what came before. And we have reached that time with SSDs. It's taken 30 years - but that's another story.

This new wave of comparing SSDs to each other kicked off with the article RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best? - which included views from leading SSD oems on both sides of the fence. And other articles have demolished the myths about SLC flash SSDs while highlighting the risks of using MLC flash in inappropriate server applications.

In my view comparing SSDs to HDDs does not give you a useful picture when you're looking at options in the server acceleration market.
SSD articles Although I expect that such weak comparisons will be sprinkled in lite weight SSD articles for the next few years - it's time for some stronger seasoning. It's time for more articles by SSD vendors to say how their products and technologies compare with other SSDs.
...Later:- some companies are still doing it... ..In contrast - here's a fact filled vendor-neutral white paper (published November 2008) - which provides useful measurements and comparisons...
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