Awesome post – I see that DELL has updated their page and are now selling the Duo drive:

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=ioDrive&cat=all&x=0&y=0

(Odd that the 640Gb is less than the 320!)

Curious to see your results when you benchmark with MySQL.

I’ve got my company looking at FusionIO now – just the cost ratio with consolidation against very expensive power and rackspace makes them attractive. Seems that for the price of 2-3 DELL 2950 with decent RAM we can get 2 FusionIO 320GB cards with the same spec’ed DELLs…

-Trent

– SSD news and history (some test reporting)
http://www.storagesearch.com/

– extensive tests (this link is to latest)
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=1

Points about SSD;
- NAND is commodity; Samsung parts are good, others maybe less.
- industrial strength drives (STEC, Texas, Fusion-io, and the like) have controllers which wear level the NAND such that one can write gigabytes/day and still last a decade or longer. Intel’s controller is still the most efficient in consumer devices. SandForce and Indilinx are catching up.
- retail drives, Intel X-25M included, aren’t up to server needs. Pillar replaced Intel with STEC for this reason.
- PCIe devices, such as the Fusion-io, aren’t really drives and aren’t bootable without a device driver. I recall reading that Fusion-io has a fix for Win7, but while they list a driver for RH/Suse and a build script for Debian/Ubuntu, I don’t see that this driver supports booting; it may.

- Main Point: don’t bother using SSD if all you’re doing is running flat-file images in some database (MySql developers do this a lot). the real win with SSD is being able to run heavy join BCNF schemas, which are much smaller in footprint, and faster since they don’t contain anywhere near the volume of bytes.

I’d love that idea on website with benchmark results, but each time I think about it even
for publish my own results it seems very hard to implement properly..

There are so many scenarios and results, so I can’t think how to formalize it.

But if you have insights how to do it – I would like to see!

I’m thinking about creating a website dedicated to recording benchmark results. Users could register results for existing benchmarks, such as DBT3, SSB or sysbench, or to register their own benchmark. Vadim could register his ‘ontime’ benchmark on the site then record the results he achieved on his hardware, along with those hardware specs. Other users could run the same benchmark, and report their specs as well. This way, people could test different engines and different hardware and compare other results easily.

Does this sound like something useful? Does something like this exist and I missed it?

Jos,

Tell that two the two 256GB OCZ Vertex SSD disks I have. Both failed within two weeks of one another, in different systems. Neither drive even shows up on the SATA bus when I connect the drives!

One disk was connected to a adaptec dual core SAS controller, and the other to a regular old internal Intel mobo SATA II connector.

I’ve honestly had serious performance or reliability issues with almost every SSD device I’ve owned and tested. I’ve gone back to plain old arrays of inexpensive disks, at least for my home stuff.

When solid state devices are created a certain amount of extra memory is put into the device for fail-over.
As sections of memory die data is routed to the extra memory (that can not otherwise be accessed).
Unfortunately when the extra memory is used and any other memory is lost the solid state drive completely fails.

What I’m suggesting (and not 100% sure of since there could be some technology I don’t know about in SSD), is that the meantime before failure will generally be shorter in SSD drives than standard drives unless the SSDs are used primarily as READ devices (it’s writes that make sections of memory fail).