Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#2We're at a point where regular hard drives are ridiculously cheap $60-80 for 2TB (2.9c - 3.9c per GB), while regular SSDs are $1.5-$2 per GB.
There's a huge gap in between.
Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#3We're at a point where regular hard drives are ridiculously cheap $60-80 for 2TB (2.9c - 3.9c per GB), while regular SSDs are $1.5-$2 per GB. There's a huge gap in between. Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
One of my biggest questions is the lifetime of these drives. I know that flash memory has a certain number of write-cycles but has there been any study done on how long these drives last in an almost constant write environment like OLTP?
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#4We're at a point where regular hard drives are ridiculously cheap $60-80 for 2TB (2.9c - 3.9c per GB), while regular SSDs are $1.5-$2 per GB. There's a huge gap in between. Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
> Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
Hybrid drives aim to bring together the (cheap) capacity of hard drives and the speed of SSDs.
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#5Fuck yes.
This isn't about GB/$.
This is about IOPS/($ x density) and Throughput/($ x density). Databases and datastores used to be limited by iops, and SSD's are altering the balance of where that bottleneck occurs: we've already seen absurd 9x SSD systems[1] and 24x SSD systems[2] running off three or four SATA/SCSI cards; this offers those levels of performance in a single package.
3GBps is 24Gbps. A mere two of these will max out the IO Hub on a Nehalem, which is good for 40Gbps[3]. As for getting that data into the CPU, the top of the line MP Xeon offers four QPI links good for 25.6Gbps a piece. That's 100Gbps, which four of these could provide, and it stands as a fixed upper bound for how much data an SMP (4-way in this case) system can be fed (and thus crunch) at once (and uses expensive 4-way cpus to do it). The throughput limit is now (erm, will be) the platform, not the IO storage. This is huge. Wait, no, strike that, it's incomprehensibly small, small and fast.
References:
[1] "Battleship mtron" http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/
[2] "Samsung SSD Awesomeness" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22
[3] "Building a Single Box 100Gbps Router" via http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#6We're at a point where regular hard drives are ridiculously cheap $60-80 for 2TB (2.9c - 3.9c per GB), while regular SSDs are $1.5-$2 per GB. There's a huge gap in between. Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
> Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems. Hybrid drives aim to bring together the (cheap) capacity of hard drives and the speed of SSDs.
And they fail at both.
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#7We're at a point where regular hard drives are ridiculously cheap $60-80 for 2TB (2.9c - 3.9c per GB), while regular SSDs are $1.5-$2 per GB. There's a huge gap in between. Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
One of my biggest questions is the lifetime of these drives. I know that flash memory has a certain number of write-cycles but has there been any study done on how long these drives last in an almost constant write environment like OLTP?
IIRC, SLC NAND has ~100,000 write cycles and MLC ~10,000 (enterprise-level SSDs almost exclusively use the former). I'm not aware of any recent studies specifically on durability, but given that there are no moving parts I'd imagine that SSDs last at least as long as mechanical drives. There's also this bit from the press release: "[The] 700GB drive [is] able to write 28 terabytes of data every day for five years."
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#8Fuck yes. This isn't about GB/$. This is about IOPS/($ x density) and Throughput/($ x density). Databases and datastores used to be limited by iops, and SSD's are altering the balance of where that bottleneck occurs: we've already seen absurd 9x SSD systems[1] and 24x SSD systems[2] running off three or four SATA/SCSI cards; this offers those levels of performance in a single package. 3GBps is 24Gbps. A mere two of t…
I'd love to hear about the ASIC this runs on.
Will it present SATA's AHCI interface? Will it eschew SATA altogether?
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#9We're at a point where regular hard drives are ridiculously cheap $60-80 for 2TB (2.9c - 3.9c per GB), while regular SSDs are $1.5-$2 per GB. There's a huge gap in between. Hybrid SSD/HDD drives were supposed to fill that niche, but they are still pretty crappy, they don't really solve any HDD problems.
One of my biggest questions is the lifetime of these drives. I know that flash memory has a certain number of write-cycles but has there been any study done on how long these drives last in an almost constant write environment like OLTP?
Warranty is key here. That and having prepared ops. Which is no different than it was with HD's.
But for the sake of it, let's run the numbers.
A 700GB drive being written at 2GB/s would fully cycle in 350 seconds. That's 86400/350 is 247 cycles a day (amusing 247 ~ 24/7 coincidence spotted).
Assuming a 10,000 cycle life, that's 40 days of operation. Go to 100,000 cycle life and that a 400 day lifetime of non-stop full-speed writing.
And worth every sweet cent of that somewhat short life, in this commenters opinion. I'm sure that the half rack of HD's it'd take to get this kind of IOPs wouldn't have an in any way improved expected lifetime cost. If you just need throughput the story may be a little different.
Re: Micron Demos PCIe RealSSD P320h, Achieves Over 3GB/s Of Sustained Throughput
#10What's the crash-safety/power-loss durability on these guys?
The press release mentions OLTP workloads, but if they don't have supercaps or a battery or something, you'd have to be an absolute idiot to trust your data to them, no matter how compelling the performance numbers. The pictures don't show any connectors for a battery or capacitor-looking doodads (or at least anything I recognize as such), so I'm extremely skeptical. Unf., the linked site is down for "maintenance", and some quick googling yields nothing on-point.
(Edit: formatting)