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Poll: Are you using SSDs?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#51

Post by tryp »

dawkins wrote: post #39

I use a Patriot Torx 128GB in my dev machine. It died completely after two weeks. The seller told me that they are very reliable and that it was just bad luck and replaced it with a new one. It is so fast and silent that I decided to give it another try and I have been using it for three months now. I didn't try to recover the data but I think that in case of failure or damage it is more difficult to recover the info…

It would be much easier to read the NAND IC's than it is to read a magnetic disk out of a hard drive, but you'd need to figure out the block format the drive used in order to reconstruct your files.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#52

Post by iigs »

Where I work we presently have between 5-10 TB (actual, not raw, not counting replicants) across several MySQL shards. $/iop they just slay magnetic solutions.

The most interesting insight I can offer is that because there is no seek time penalty and SSD throughput increases as the I/O scatters, our tests with RAID 5 are essentially as fast as RAID 10, which makes $/gb much better than it looks at first blush.

TRIM through hardware RAID is still an unsolved problem for us, as is getting wear life SMART data (Intel X25M G2) through the RAID controller. My gut feeling is that the final solution is probably a JBOD controller and Linux software RAID.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#53

Post by weaksauce »

egb wrote: post #27

Lots of people here have mac laptops (like me) - any concerns about lack of TRIM support in OSX? Some blogs says that the "easy fix" for lack of TRIM is to just backup/reformat/restore your SSD every X months. Eeech

I guess the general setiment is that even after a while of using it the ssd will still be orders of magnitude faster than your spinning disk. Doing an Xbench report on my ssd and my 7200 500gb seagate is laughable. One thing you should worry about is the damn thing being too fast and saturating the sata channel. I have a late-2009 15" mbp and it has a poorly implemented sata. If you do the fw upgrade to 3Gbps your drive will most likely not work unless you either get lucky and have a newer revved logic board or downgrade the fw to 1.6. I had to go this route. Email me if you need the link to the fw.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#54

Post by bapadna »

mbreese wrote: post #35

I use a SSD in my laptop, but our servers haven't made the move yet. So, this is an important thing to remember. Once, I needed to write a program to deal with large DNA sequencing files (10-100 GB per sample). On my laptop, the program worked great, but on the server it sucked due to the disk IO. I ended up needing a completely different algorithm, but this wasn't at all clear when using my SSD. If only we could aff…

I'm using ZFS with SSDs as L2ARC and intent log devices, and standard SAS drives as the main spindles, all sitting in a JBOD enclosure.

It won't make purely random reads fast, but it makes my workloads scream.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#55

Post by [deleted] »

iigs wrote: post #52

Where I work we presently have between 5-10 TB (actual, not raw, not counting replicants) across several MySQL shards. $/iop they just slay magnetic solutions. The most interesting insight I can offer is that because there is no seek time penalty and SSD throughput increases as the I/O scatters, our tests with RAID 5 are essentially as fast as RAID 10, which makes $/gb much better than it looks at first blush. TRIM t…

[deleted]

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#56

Post by bengl3rt »

Three SSDs in my Mac Pro - two SATA (Boot & Apps) and one PCIe (Work). SATA are SandForce OEM (Digicube) and PCIe is OCZ Revodrive.

I put these into the machine as soon as I got it so I can't really comment on how much of a difference it would have made if I had left the stock HDD in there instead. That said, disk bound operations (like computing audio waveforms) happen in the blink of an eye.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#57

Post by harold »

msy wrote: post #24

An SSD in my Macbook pro is without question the most noticeable hardware upgrade I've had in years. Absolutely wonderful.

Same here. The performance boost is very noticeable. A great upgrade and easy to do on the recent Macbook Pro lineup.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#58

Post by kbob »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #7

I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.

They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#59

Post by bdwalter »

We are using MLC SSD's in production for our Cassandra clusters. It is very important to consider your workload when implementing SSD's in a production application.

There are MLC SSD's and SLC SSD's. The former being reasonably priced (think MLC SSD's have a fixed write lifetime and will die or degrade after a certain number of writes. SLC SSD's have no such limits.

Cassandra for example has a very predictable write workload given our application, but other datastores (like an active write heavy mysql OLTP DB) would kill an MLC SSD very quickly.

We are using Cassandra to drive an API that must service thousands of requests a second but also with sub 100ms response times. Not a typical web use of Cassandra. Response times from hard disk just were not fast enough for our needs.

A new type of MLC is hitting the shelves now too. Enterprise MLC... supposed to be more resilient to the issues MLC ssd's have faced.

We are using OCZ Vertex.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#60

Post by drats »

hcho wrote: post #26

A question to those who use SSDs: Did you notice any bugs in software you are using(or developing), which was previously hidden due to slow I/O?

I think it's the other way around. I had a classifier in python hitting a sqlite db for every new training instance and it was taking forever, with the SSD it was done in 20% of the time. So developers these days are in danger of presuming that the deployment platform i/o is as fast as their development machines and shipping slow apps to users (or to their servers that are still on mech drives).

It's noticable in all sorts of things beyond startup times when you swap over to a SSD drive. Even something simple like browsers; browsers speed up because whatever they are using to store history and the currently open tabs for crash recovery doesn't have an i/o lag and so the interface becomes much more snappy and pleasant to use with a solid state drive. Should your app write such small things immediately, and slow down the UI for a fraction of a second, or cache the writes in memory a little longer for not-so-critical data and write at an opportune moment? Depends on the app, but people should be wary.

That said, I will echo everyone else who uses them and say it's the single best investment you can make in your machine. Especially with 40 gig drives around $100, even if that requires a bit of juggling when you fill it up and have to move some of your data from your OS drive to your legacy drives/backup solution.

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