Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Wed, 10 Sep 2008, Al Hopper wrote: > > >> Interesting flash technology overview and SSD review here: >> >> http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403 >> and another review here: >> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012.html >> > > These seem like regurgitations of the same marketing drivel that you > notified us about before. > > These Intel products are assembled in China based on non-Intel FLASH > components (from Micron). There is little reason to believe that > Intel will "corner the market" due to having an aggressive marketing > department. There are other companies in the business who may seem > oddly silent compared with Intel/Micron, but enjoy a vastly larger > share of the FLASH market. >
Intel and Micron have a joint venture for doing the flash SSDs. For some reason, Intel's usually excellent marketing team wasn't involved in naming the JV, so it is called "IM Flash Technologies"... boring :-) http://www.imftech.com/ Samsung is another major vendor, rumored to be trying to buy Sandisk, but it ain't over 'til its over... might be a JV opportunity, too. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eb1f748e-7f34-11dd-a3da-000077b07658.html > These reviews continue their apples/oranges comparison by comparing > cheap lowest-grade desktop/laptop drives with the expensive Intel SSD > drives. The hard drive performance specified is for low-grade > consumer drives rather than enterprise drives. The hard drive > reliability specified is for low-grade consumer drives rather than > enterprise drives. The table at Tom's Hardware talks about 160GB SSD > drives which are not even announced. > > The SLC storage sizes are still quite tiny. The wear leveling > algorithm ensures that the drive starts losing its memory in all > locations at about the same time. RAID does not really help much here > for reliability since RAID systems are usually comprised of the same > devices installed at the same time and seeing identical write > activity. RAID works due to failures being random. If the failures > are not random (i.e. all drives start reporting read errors at once) > then RAID does not really help. Hopefully the integration with the OS > is sufficient that the user knows it is time to change out the drive > before it is too late to salvage the data. > I think the market segments are becoming more solidified. There is clearly a low-cost consumer market. But there is also a large, unsatisfied demand for enterprise-class SSDs. Intel has already announced an SLC based "extreme" product line. Brian's blog seems to be one of the best distilled descriptions I've seen: http://www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/360032036.html -- richard > Write performance to SSDs is not all it is cracked up to be. Buried > in the AnandTech writeup, there is mention that while 4K can be > written at once, 512KB needs to be erased at once. This means that > write performance to an empty device will seem initially pretty good, > but then it will start to suffer as 512KB regions need to be erased to > make space for more writes. ZFS's COW scheme will intially be fast, > but then the writes will slow after all blocks on the device have been > written to before. Since writing to a used drive incurs additional > latency, the device will need to buffer writes in RAM so that it > returns to the user faster. This may increase the chance of data loss > due to power failure. > > Bob > ====================================== > Bob Friesenhahn > [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ > GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
