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Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

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Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#131

Post by ggm »

wtallis wrote: post #93
ggm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can somebody please write up modern SSD and state of the world regarding data retention, modes, applicability for SSD replacing spinning rust "on the shelf" offline...

SSDs make no sense for offline archival. They're more expensive than hard drives and will be for the foreseeable future. You don't need the improved random IO performance or power efficiency for a drive that's mostly sitting on a shelf.

If what you have is an SSD, you need to know how applicable it is to unplug/remove it, and hold it offline. What I read is that this is not a good fit for how the data retention of an SSD works, it expects to be plugged in to power more frequently. If the storage is safe for 6 months to a year to 10 years, it would be good to know. I believe it may not be.

I entirely agree that its not the medium of choice yet, if ever. LTO still exists for many people, perhaps 25+ TB hdd will make that moot.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#132

Post by tenacious_tuna »

blindm wrote: post #26
Felk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think having a backup solution is the better choice here. You can use your SSDs until they die or become too slow, and you won't lose your data if it breaks before you replace it after a year

> I think having a backup solution is the better choice here Any particular provider you would recommend? I've looked into backblaze but it seems a bit pricey. Also: I am aware that cloud based backup solutions have very little failure rate in terms of drives since they're probably using RAID

I use Backblaze's B2 (think S3) style storage for backup, and I'm paying about ~$4.50 USD for ~1TB of storage per month. I don't use a ton of bandwidth though, so if you have a lot of churn in the files you're backing up you could see higher costs, but looking over the numbers Backblaze as the cheapest solution by far to others I looked at.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#133

Post by Godel_unicode »

rtkwe wrote: post #57
mehrdadn wrote: post #32

I liked most of the piece, but some bits rubbed me the wrong way: > I was taken by surprise by the fact that although every one of my peers is certainly extremely bright, most of them carried misconceptions about how to best exploit the performance of modern storage technology leading to suboptimal designs, even if they were aware of the increasing improvements in storage technology. > In the process of writing this…

Yeah how many people are running apps on servers served at all or even partially by NVMe SSDs? Where I work for our on prem stuff it's basically all network storage.

IBM research put out a bunch of white papers a few years back about the huge performance difference between spinning rust, SATA SSDs, and NVMe. The performance gains were amazing, especially with things like parquet.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#134

Post by fock »

rtkwe wrote: post #57
mehrdadn wrote: post #32

I liked most of the piece, but some bits rubbed me the wrong way: > I was taken by surprise by the fact that although every one of my peers is certainly extremely bright, most of them carried misconceptions about how to best exploit the performance of modern storage technology leading to suboptimal designs, even if they were aware of the increasing improvements in storage technology. > In the process of writing this…

Yeah how many people are running apps on servers served at all or even partially by NVMe SSDs? Where I work for our on prem stuff it's basically all network storage.

not apps and not running there, but we bought a NAS for our really small compute cluster and just put 16 cheap (=marketed as read-intensive) NVME drives in (well, originally 8 – but then there was money left, which had to be spent fast), because IOPS are magnitudes better than HDDs and for around 3 times $/TB the hassle of configuring some caching just wasn't worth it in our opinion.

Performance on par with typical Desktop-SSDs over NFS (multiple clients possible). Definitely better than the old 1TB/disk-RAID5.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#135

Post by SteveNuts »

tanelpoder wrote: post #125
aidenn0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 8 SATA SSDs in my workstation; are there motherboards that could run a similar NVMe setup?

With PCIe lane bifurcation, you won’t even need a PCIe switch on your expansion card. I have 10 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe SSDs in my AMD ThreadRipper PRO/WX machine (2 in motherboard M.2 slots, and 2 x “expansion cards” that hold 4 SSDs each). Had to configure PCIe bifurcation in BIOS, so lanes connected to a PCIe x16 card will be treated like 4 x PCIe x4 instead. So far the best aggregate results with io_uring 10.5 M 4K…

That's incredible, which PCIe cards are you using?

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#136

Post by pixl97 »

amelius wrote: post #123
bufferoverflow wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because permissions is an OS-enforced feature, not the filesystem feature. If you have access to the drive, permissions are meaningless.

Permissions (and ownership info) can be useful even if you have complete access to a filesystem. By the way, assume you have root permission. How would you replace a single file in a random tar-file, without changing any of the permissions/userids/groupids inside the tar-file? You can't untar it because the users inside the tar file don't correspond with the ones on your system. So, you'll have to use special tools,…

Don't the files on disk just keep the current uid/gid anyway. You'd change one file and zip it back up.

Seen plenty of files with just a number instead of an owner in the past.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#137

Post by touisteur »

stingraycharles wrote: post #95
Miraste wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optane has been commercially available for five years already and it's not used in any device I'm aware of. Assuming it will find broad adoption at this point seems like a bad bet.

I know a few optane deployments in finance, but other than that, it seems incredibly difficult to justify the steep price.

They everywhere in NUCs. Small size but hey :-) that's how I reboot some apps ultrafast... Mmap my whole app-state and gooo

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#138

Post by wokkel »

amelius wrote: post #123
bufferoverflow wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because permissions is an OS-enforced feature, not the filesystem feature. If you have access to the drive, permissions are meaningless.

Permissions (and ownership info) can be useful even if you have complete access to a filesystem. By the way, assume you have root permission. How would you replace a single file in a random tar-file, without changing any of the permissions/userids/groupids inside the tar-file? You can't untar it because the users inside the tar file don't correspond with the ones on your system. So, you'll have to use special tools,…

No, you use tar --numeric-owner and forget about the names.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#139

Post by pixl97 »

blindm wrote: post #13
zbrozek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do that wears them out so fast? I've been running the same NVMe disk as my daily driver since 2015 and it's not showing any signs of degradation.

> What do you do that wears them out so fast? I forgot to mention I do a lot of heavy writes to it. It is common to see me creating a huge 20GB virtual machine disk image, using it for a few hours, then deleting it, before creating a new one in its place. I'm a huge virtualization freak.

Eh, still that is not that much data. I've had much longer life out of SSDs that are used as cache drives and perform a huge amount of writes per day, with Intel and Samsung drives that is.

If you're losing drives that fast check your thermal management instead. Don't run your drives hot.

Re: Modern storage is plenty fast, but the APIs are bad

#140

Post by wtallis »

p1necone wrote: post #118
wtallis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One SSD is sufficient for almost all consumer systems. The only reason to want more than two SSDs is if you're re-using at least one old tiny SSD in a new machine. SATA ports will stick around in desktops only for the sake of hard drives. There may be a few niches left where using several SATA SSDs in a workstation still makes some kind of sense, and obviously not all server platforms have migrated to NVMe yet. But a…

Drive price doesn't scale linearly with capacity, you can save a fair bit of money sticking with multiple smaller capacity drives vs one big one.

Drive price per GB doesn't even scale monotonically with capacity. Right now, the best price per GB is usually on 1TB or 2TB models. And if you need more than two such devices with SSD performance, you're far outside the bounds of consumer computing and into workstation territory.
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