"Disks are dead, they just don’t know it yet"

I have been drooling over following Texas Memory Systems for a couples years and more recently, BitMicro.

I am not comparing the products that the companies sell because they are different products and the measurements are not the same. These bullets are mainly for drool factor and background for a post that I will refer you too.

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Texas Memory Systems:

RamSan-400 SSD SAN

• The World's Fastest StorageĀ®

• First solid state disk with 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces.

• First solid state disk with 4x InfiniBand interfaces.

• Over 400,000 random I/Os per second.

• 3000 MB/s random sustained external throughput.

• Full array of hardware redundancy to ensure availability.

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BitMicro:

E-DiskĀ® Altimaā„¢ 4Gb Fibre Channel 3.5" Solid State Drive

• Up to 640GB of storage per disk on 1" drives.
• 1.6TB on 3.5" drives
• 800 MB/sec Full Duplex Burst Rate
• Up to 55,000 IOPS I/O Rate
• Similar offering on u320 SCSI

Now these are numbers from the manufacturers. Lots of missing info like read\write numbers. Numbers for different sizes of reads and writes etc. However, did I say WOW?

I am making this post because I ran across a blog post by Mike Ault on a FriendFeed conversation.

Mike address's these SSD "lies"

1. Solid state drive technology is very expensive
2. Solid state devices are best when directly attached to the internal bus architecture
3. Solid state drives will only be niche players
4. You can get the same IO rate from disks as from SSD

and he ends with this quote:

I am not afraid to say it: SSD technology is here, it is ready for prime time and it is only a matter of time before disks are relegated to second tier storage. Disks are dead, they just donā€™t know it yet.

We can only hope so :) I highly recommend reading the whole posts here.

I hope Microsoft is watching this technology. Sure, SQL will like a SSD SAN right now but I bet it could be heavily be optimized to run on SSD.

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edit: link fixed

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Permalink     3 Comments  

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COMMENTS:

I just hope they are affordable and in place for laptops by the time I'm ready to buy one next spring. That 640GB would do nicely in a new thinkpad next spring.

Snap! Sudden thought. Since it's all sold state, you wouldn't have the issues running virtual machines off of them as with disks, so a vm running off the same drive as the OS should, in theory, be quite fast.

Sweet.

posted @ Saturday, July 26, 2008 12:18 AM by Arcane Code

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Can you fix the "whole post here" link? It does not seem to work and I am interested in reading the information.
Thanks

posted @ Saturday, July 26, 2008 12:23 AM by Jeremiah Clark

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ArcaneCode - keep in mind that both VMware and Hyper-V still only support one HBA per lun per guest OS max, so you still have SAN I/O bandwidth problems on big databases like data warehouses, or anything else that would normally use SAN multipathing. Using SSDs reduces the random access problem, but not the bandwidth problem. I'm eagerly awaiting VMware's eventual fix for that.

posted @ Sunday, July 27, 2008 6:13 AM by Brent Ozar

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