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All these drives were on hardware RAID cards it seems, is it feasible to do without them?
I am looking forward to the day when all SSDs ship minimal firmware, and offload all the complex work to (main-CPU) software.
Unfortunately that day isn't going to happen. In fact the opposite is happening -- interesting spinning rust technology like Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are getting more complex translation layers.
This kind of thing tends to be quasi-cyclic.
At one time, desktop computers had separate FPUs. Over time, those got integrated onto the main CPU, but then the trend switched back, with heavy calculations moving off-CPU to the GPU.
The mainframe->desktop->cloud story is similar.
I say "quasi"-cyclic because (e.g.) cloud isn't really the same as mainframe, but the transition back and forth between centralized and decentralized is still striking nonetheless.
I am looking forward to the day when all SSDs ship minimal firmware, and offload all the complex work to (main-CPU) software.
Wouldn't that make performance a lot worse, for both CPU and disks? Offloading the job to something closer to the flash chips and fully dedicated to servicing them sounds like a better (and the current) path. Same for high speed network links.
Of course SSD firmware is buggy. You know why? Because any half-decent electrical and computer engineering team can slap a NAND flash controller and some flash chips on a PCB, take the controller's manufacturer's reference firmware implementation, tweak the dozens of knobs provided by the reference implementation (ignore FLUSH commands, change the amount of reserved sectors, disable this, enable that, etc), change th…
That is a nice theory, except for the fact that firmware bugs have hit big players equally badly, if not even worse. Intel and Samsung come easily to mind, and Sandforce was notorious for not getting their own firmware to work (for their own controllers).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a nice theory, except for the fact that firmware bugs have hit big players equally badly, if not even worse. Intel and Samsung come easily to mind, and Sandforce was notorious for not getting their own firmware to work (for their own controllers).
Since when has Intel been hit equally?
I am looking forward to the day when all SSDs ship minimal firmware, and offload all the complex work to (main-CPU) software.
Wouldn't that make performance a lot worse, for both CPU and disks? Offloading the job to something closer to the flash chips and fully dedicated to servicing them sounds like a better (and the current) path. Same for high speed network links.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't that make performance a lot worse, for both CPU and disks? Offloading the job to something closer to the flash chips and fully dedicated to servicing them sounds like a better (and the current) path. Same for high speed network links.
This is appropriate: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.htm...
I'm not so versed in the area so I'm just blind guessing here.
Of course SSD firmware is buggy. You know why? Because any half-decent electrical and computer engineering team can slap a NAND flash controller and some flash chips on a PCB, take the controller's manufacturer's reference firmware implementation, tweak the dozens of knobs provided by the reference implementation (ignore FLUSH commands, change the amount of reserved sectors, disable this, enable that, etc), change th…
That is a nice theory, except for the fact that firmware bugs have hit big players equally badly, if not even worse. Intel and Samsung come easily to mind, and Sandforce was notorious for not getting their own firmware to work (for their own controllers).
I am looking forward to the day when all SSDs ship minimal firmware, and offload all the complex work to (main-CPU) software.
Wouldn't that make performance a lot worse, for both CPU and disks? Offloading the job to something closer to the flash chips and fully dedicated to servicing them sounds like a better (and the current) path. Same for high speed network links.