Edit: I cannot remember the last time I had to tolerate spinning rust on a laptop. Cost has come down a ton since I first wrote this.
Originally posted August 16, 2011 on AIXchange
I’ve written about the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD). Perhaps that’s why someone sent me this 3-minute video. The speaker, whose name is Arthur Bergman, gives a rather impassioned — and let’s just say, earthy — endorsement of SSD over spinning disk (or as he calls it, “spinning rust”).
Seriously, beware the swear. This may not be suitable for listening in your workplace. Watch live streaming video from oreillyconfs at livestream.com
Some points I transcribed from the video:
- “Everyone who doesn’t have a SSD in their machine is wasting their life.”
- He looked at the audience, and started comparing the boot times of their machines. On his laptop he could boot in 12 seconds, versus a minute or more with a traditional hard disk. When he multiplied that time savings across everyone that was listening to his talk he said, “Every time we boot our computer we are wasting a day of time.”
- He asked if anyone in the room had their production machines running on SSD, and did not find anyone that was, except for one guy whose environment he had built.
- “Go buy a SSD and put it in your laptop. I keep telling everyone to get a SSD, and I keep getting back that they are too expensive. Actually they are cheaper than drives. Relevant metric is GB per IOPS.”
- He explained that on a SSD fileserver, they were running and fsck across 8 million files in 9 minutes, and it was taking 12 minutes for an rsync backup. He was seeing 4 GB/second random reads with average latency of 0.1ms and 2.2 GB/sec random read with average latency of 0.1ms.
- “If you don’t access your data, don’t get SSD.”
- He also argues how you will save power with SSDs, in his case he is showing that they use 1 watt vs. 15 watts with traditional disks.
- “1 SSD is like 44,000 IOPS, one disk drive is like 180 IOPS.”
- Start small: “You can’t drive a Formula One car, and you are currently on a bicycle, so just get a Ferrari. $1,000 for 600GB.”
As Bergman acknowledges, price keeps a lot of folks away from SSD. But as he also points out, you can start small. On that front, IBM has come out with a SSD solution that’s designed for affordability. Check out this video on IBM Easy Tier.
IBM argues that most operations are performed on a small subset of data. With this in mind, Easy Tier is designed to automatically and dynamically migrate I/O hot spots to SSD from traditional disks. Because these systems move highly active data behind the scenes with no intervention, customers benefit from SSD without having to manually migrate data. IBM claims that Easy Tier should provide 3X throughput with 10-15 percent of the data moved to SSD.
Easy Tier is available on the IBM Storwize V7000 storage subsystem as well as the SVC and the DS8000 product lines.
So what’s your view of SSD? If you don’t use it, why? Is it due to cost, data density per drive or some other factor? Please register your thoughts in Comments. I’m curious to learn what is holding you back.