Tuesday, July 29

Geek

Erk

Someone who knows what they're doing (i.e. not any of the hundreds of PC hardware review sites) got their hands on one of those cheap new OCZ Core Series SSDs and tested it.

The results are mixed.

Sequential reads are excellent - 126MB/s average.
Sequential writes are good - 46MB/s average.
Random reads are superb - over 2000 IOPS for 8K pages (a regular disk drive gives you about 100).
Random writes are appalling - 4 IOPS.

That is very very strange.  Random writes are slow on flash because of the block erase structure, but 250ms?  That's worse than slow, that's very slow indeed.

I think I'll still get mine - I have one on order, but only small quantities of the drives have reached Australia and mine is still somewhere in the Pacific - and independently verify those results.  And then beat the SSD market over the head with them.  (Or not, if things turn out different.)

Update: OCZ have published a new and more detailed datasheet, which shows benchmark results of 2500 IOPS for random reads and 500 IOPS for random writes.  500 IOPS is fine; that's the equivalent performance of a 4-disk RAID-0 array (or two disks if you're using expensive SAS drives) on one small cheap module.  

A 15,000 RPM SAS 146GB drive is about the same price as the OCZ 64GB SSD, but to get the same performance and reliability you'd need 4 of them (RAID-10), so if the SSD can deliver, it's still a win.  (And that's write performance - to match the read performance you'd need a 10-disk SAS array, or 20 SATA drives.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 272 words, total size 2 kb.

1

OT: Problem report, maybe.

Does the search engine index the "more inside" section of posts? I wanted to find my picture-heavy post on Eiken, so I did a search for "pudding" and came up empty. "yoghurt" also misses.

Yet both those words are in the "more inside" part of that post.

Searching for "raunchy" turns up three hits, but that post isn't one of them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, July 29 2008 09:14 AM (+rSRq)

2 It should do.  I'll check.

The new search engine definitely does.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 29 2008 10:57 AM (PiXy!)

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