SSD Storage: 2018 in review
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SSD Storage: 2018 in review
1–10 of 131 posts
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#2Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#3Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
Those filesystems seem to handle different design requirements though. I also don't trust most vendors to properly encrypt the drives in the firmware [1], so I end up putting dm-crypt over most drives. It also doesn't account for raid setups, which are usually done at the block level. (Although I like snapraid for some use cases.)
[1] https://www.welivesecurity.com/2018/11/15/security-researche...
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#4Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
I think it's unlikely that manufacturers will want to turn their consumer SSD devices into a dumb flash storage and move their FTL into the open (like a API layer inside the Linux kernel). It's where their added value lies.
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#5Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
Probably not putting drives in charge of the entire filesystem, but object storage would be a good way to let the drive manage itself and take care of the details of where to store everything. The SCSI commands for object storage have existed for a decade but so far haven't seen much uptake.
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#6Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
Those flash translation layers on the SSDs are generally used to maintain QoS/and do wear leveling, block management etc.
I don't think we'll see file systems go away, but what we may see is more knowledge pushed into the file system, instead of keeping it down in the controller.
We have started to see that with the advent of LightNVM which exposes a more RAW API into the drive and the FTL is maintained in the kernel. The current "generic" implementation of the LightNVM FTL is called pblk:
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/drivers/light...
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#7Exciting times indeed, just type "ssd" in your favorite search box. I'm about to upgrade to a 512GB SSD that costs half what an SSD half its size used to cost 5 years ago! Starting this year, I'm considering getting a low-end 120GB for $25 every year on January 1st to use as a write-once backup for all my work.
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#8I wish Intel Optane nvme sticks had more capacity. The 120gb drive turned my i7 6500u
laptop TWICE as fast as desktop AMD 1700x with regular drive. For example Python tests on a fairly big app ran for 3 minutes on a laptop and same tests about 7 minutes on a supposedly more powerful desktop machine.
Edit: by regular I mean 960 evo
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#9Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
The flash translation layers in SSDs implement things equivalent to the journalling functionality in modern filesystems, but they don't really provide any hierarchical organization of data. So you'll still need a normal host-based filesystem for the foreseeable future, but filesystem design can be influenced by the assumption that it's running atop flash storage.
There are several efforts underway to provide more specialized software interfaces to SSDs. Several vendors have produced models that expose a key-value store instead of fixed-size block storage; with those drives, you can throw away RocksDB and speak directly to the drive with the same semantics (subject to limitations on supported key and value sizes).
There are a few competing standards for open-channel SSDs that move some of the FTL onto the host CPU so that the journalling overhead doesn't have to exist at multiple layers; the different solutions here vary in terms of how much complexity they move to the CPU vs. how much abstraction the SSD still provides for the sake of software portability. Most of the potential benefits this approach provides are being subsumed by extensions to the NVMe protocol that allow the host and SSD to exchange optional hints about data layouts, GC status, etc.
SK Hynix recently announced they're working on a SSD with transactional storage support, so that the host can send multiple write commands and either commit or abort the transaction as a whole.
Re: SSD Storage: 2018 in review
#10Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the SSD filesystem?
I think it's unlikely that manufacturers will want to turn their consumer SSD devices into a dumb flash storage and move their FTL into the open (like a API layer inside the Linux kernel). It's where their added value lies.
I think we're talking about the opposite where the SSD could take over some functionality from the OS.