[Beowulf] SSD prices

[Geoff Jacobs]

Jeff Layton wrote:
> Greg Lindahl wrote:
>> I was recently surprised to learn that SSD prices are down in the
>> $2-$3 per gbyte range. I did a survey of one brand (OCZ) at NexTag
>> and it was:
>>
>> 256 gigs = $700
>> 128 gigs =  300
>>  64 gigs =  180
>>  32 gigs =   70
>>
>> Also, Micron is saying that they're going to get into the business of
>> PCIe-attached flash, which will give us a second source for what
>> Fusion-io is shipping today.
>>
>> If you're on the "I like a real system disk" side of the
>> diskless/diskfull fence, these SSDs ought to be a lot more reliable
>> than tradtional disks. And I'd like to get rid of the mirrored
>> disks in our developer desktops...
>>   
> 
> Remember that OCZ does not equal Fusion-IO :) There are many
> factors that go into an SSD that determine performance. So the
> performance of OCZ is not nearly that of Fusion-IO's product.
> 
> For example, I've been tracking some performance testing of a
> wide variety of SSD's and spinning disks in my day job. Some of
> the SSD's are fairly inexpensive, but the performance is pretty
> pathetic. For example, if your read/write mix includes more than
> about 10% writes, then the performance of the SSD's is worse
> than a spinning disk (this is in terms of IOPS).
> 
> If you want to move up the food chain and buy some unbelievably
> fast SSD's you get can get the performance above spinning disks
> but the price is several orders of magnitude greater than spinning
> disks.

Yeah, there's a few vendors out there selling battery backed dram
solutions. Basically maxing out the interface, but stupidly expensive.
>From the benches I've seen, though, it could be a useful accelerator for
 workloads akin to databases.

> Reliability is another question and I posted a quick response to
> this list in a different email.

This being my big concern with flash.

> 
> Jeff

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs