31–40 of 62 posts
> importantly, for all SSDs, disable write-cache buffer flushing for best performance. Is this actually good advice, especially without mentioning the durability risks?
The biggest players in the game do not use SSDs for persistent storage longer than x weeks. It is offloaded to tape at some point and restored periodically.
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The biggest players in the game do not use SSDs for persistent storage longer than x weeks. It is offloaded to tape at some point and restored periodically.
>It is offloaded to tape at some point and restored periodically. This makes no sense. The main problem with disabling write flushing is what happens if the OS crashes or the power goes out. Doing periodic backups/restores provides a "last known good state" to revert to, but you'll still lose all the writes between the last backup and when you crashed. Depending on your workload this might be fine, but I doubt the CO…
Those speeds look nice. 7100srMB/s and 5250 srMB/s I ended up getting a Samsung Evo 970 plus (1TB) a while ago because it was in a sale for $85. Almost half the speed of the ones in the benchmark. Maybe I should have waited.
Those speeds look nice. 7100srMB/s and 5250 srMB/s I ended up getting a Samsung Evo 970 plus (1TB) a while ago because it was in a sale for $85. Almost half the speed of the ones in the benchmark. Maybe I should have waited.
Buy a couple more, put them in raid 0, now you have 9000MB/s
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StackOverflow answer here: https://superuser.com/a/1215634 It's essentially the typical "without this enabled, you will lose data in case of power loss, potentially breaking the O/S".
It's a tangent, but I only recently realized/considered that UPS batteries had come along for the ride with lithium-ion. I bought one that should power my internet+wifi for about an hour for $45. I guess even a small one like that would handle power blips for a home server, but in an outage the battery would quickly run out and the setting would matter.
Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I've never had a site attach extra text to copied text like this site does. I wanted to see what the test machine's case looks like, so I copied the make and model and pasted it into a search bar, and got "Read more:" and a link to the page along with the text I wanted to copy. No thanks. I'll be skipping that site in the future, unless that javascript comes from a place I c…
You can probably just block JavaScript entirely for a site like this. I doubt it depends on it. But I agree that adding text to copied text is really irritating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
StackOverflow answer here: https://superuser.com/a/1215634 It's essentially the typical "without this enabled, you will lose data in case of power loss, potentially breaking the O/S".
It's a tangent, but I only recently realized/considered that UPS batteries had come along for the ride with lithium-ion. I bought one that should power my internet+wifi for about an hour for $45. I guess even a small one like that would handle power blips for a home server, but in an outage the battery would quickly run out and the setting would matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a tangent, but I only recently realized/considered that UPS batteries had come along for the ride with lithium-ion. I bought one that should power my internet+wifi for about an hour for $45. I guess even a small one like that would handle power blips for a home server, but in an outage the battery would quickly run out and the setting would matter.
What brand/model? I’m not finding these, just the old/expensive APC models and the like.
I didn't do a lot of research, my main goal was to not have interruptions when the power blinks off.
There's APC and Amazon basics models that are about the same capacity and price.
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StackOverflow answer here: https://superuser.com/a/1215634 It's essentially the typical "without this enabled, you will lose data in case of power loss, potentially breaking the O/S".
One important point that the StackOverflow answers miss is that the Windows checkbox for buffer flushing has a different meaning for SATA SSDs than for NVMe SSDs. If you want a reasonably fair synthetic benchmark to compare NVMe SSDs against SATA SSDs while bypassing any caching the OS is doing with main system RAM, you pretty much have to toggle that switch for at least NVMe drives. Or use Linux, which has actual do…
can you elaborate on this? What's the exact difference? Do sata drives get more aggressive buffer flushing than nvme drives?
I've heard that SATA and NVME SSDs have similar performance for use cases such as lightweight app usage and loading games. Does anyone know what the typical use cases are for these high performance drives?
Even in the latter, full text indexing which every platform has had for years now makes it much less likely that the full directory tree will even get walked, and differences even less likely to be noticed. As a side note, every desktop platform's full text search seems to suffer software performance problems that are largely independent of the underlying disk
Even in the full-tree enumeration case, since Spectre/Meltdown mitigations landed, system call overhead is so high now that even with a lightning fast disk, a large chunk of total time taken to walk the directory tree is lost basically twiddling the CPU mode securely. You can definitely still see the difference between SATA and NVMe, but you can also definitely measure the amount of time during the NVMe run that is spent in software -- incrementally faster NVMe will have quickly diminishing returns.
"What about databases!" This was my original interest in SSDs to begin with. It turns out, despite being a data monkey who loves large databases, since 2013 any time I've worked with a giant dataset like this, it is always in the form of large scans (usually from something like a CSV or XML file), where SSDs don't really have a mind-blowing advantage over magnetic (but of course they are still 5-10x faster a seq io, its just that data parsing and processing is typically the bottleneck now).