Re: cf as a ssd ?

"Voytek Eymont" <[email protected]> writes:
> On Mon, June 29, 2009 6:15 pm, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> Paul Robinson <[email protected]> writes:
>>> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>>>>> I'm hoping for performance and power saving gains
>>
>> The original poster clarified: ... from using a CF card as a cheap
>> persons SSD, rather than laying out the dollars to purchase the real deal.
>
> Daniel, Paul,
>
> much obliged for both anwsers.
> as the SATA/CF with 8GB was abt. $50, I think the 'real deal' of 100+ for
> 32GB sounds like a better value all around;
>
> though, $15 or something for IDE/CF might be worth it
>
>>Is that a "real" SSD, like the Intel or Vertex stuff,
>
> what is there to watch for/differentiate in different brands SSD drives ?

Performance.  To quote Linus Torvalds:

    For example, a vendor who shall remain nameless has an SSD disk out there
    that they were also hawking at the Kernel Summit, and while they get fine
    throughput (something like 50+MB/s on big contiguous writes), they
    benchmark a pitiful 10 (yes, that's ten, as in "how many fingers do you
    have) small random writes per second. That is slower than a rotational
    disk.

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/ssd-followup.html


Personally, I would only put good money down for an Intel SSD today, unless
I could personally benchmark the small random write performance on something
else.

Intel don't own the market, as other big vendors are following, but the latest
Vertex SSD performance is *still* terrible: maximum write latency is down from
a second and a half to three quarters of a second ... but, boy, that still
sucks.


Your millage will vary, of course, and read performance is always great on
these things — so a read-intensive workload, or something that can do random
writes to a fast disk or network, is going to benefit significantly.

Regards,
        Daniel
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