there are two types of solid state drives, the inexpensive ones like the flash usb key drives and the ones that sit in hd cases meant to replace sata/ide drives. the latter are expensive but they are fast in real-world performance. however, a 15000rpm sas drive still blows the doors off anything out there, including the ssd drives and raid arrays of 7200rpm drives. right now the only reasons to consider ssd are durability and power consumption. for performance, the 15000rpm drives are better and they're cheaper, byte-for-dollar.
My RAID0 WD 74 gig Raptors: ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136033 ) HD Tune: Intel Raid 0 Volume Benchmark Transfer Rate Minimum : 97.1 MB/sec Transfer Rate Maximum : 138.7 MB/sec Transfer Rate Average : 121.1 MB/sec Access Time : 8.1 ms Burst Rate : 106.4 MB/sec CPU Usage : 3.1% Running with a Quad core Pent and 4 gigs of pc8500 memory. I'm happy
What 15k drive blows the door off an SSD drive with specs of 120Mbps/100 MBps Read/Write and nearly zero access time?
Actually, I quite enjoy that noise compared to a 7200rpm HDD. I know I'm getting my money's worth when it's doing some intensive seeking.
not that mfr specs mean jack, but since you asked... 15000 rpm sas drives by seagate have specs of over 175mb/sec for reading. notice how that article says the samsung ssd beats any "consumer grade" hard drive. in other words, they won't out-perform a 15k sas.
http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/ Tera-RamSan Details Up to 1 Terabyte of non-volatile DDRRAM in 24U. Unlimited overall capacity Over 3.2 million random I/O requests per second. Over 24 GB/second of random sustainable data bandwidth. Up to 512 physical LUNs. Requires 2,500 watts of power. Up to 8 independent non-volatile solid state disks (SSD) modules. Each SSD module is a RamSan-400, including 128 GB of DDRRAM and up to eight 4-Gbit Fibre Channel connections or four 4x InfiniBand ports. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9047158 BitMicro unveils 1.6TB solid state disk drive November 15, 2007 (TechWorld.com) -- BitMicro has announced a flash memory-based solid state drive (SSD) with wide-ranging capacities of up to 1.6TB. The drive, which comes in a 3.5-in. format and supports 4Gbit/sec. Fibre Channel connectivity, could take on a core element of the hard disk drive market, which uses the same format. SSDs access data in microseconds, instead of the millliseconds that traditional hard drives use to retrieve data. The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. By comparison, a fast hard drive for example will run at around 300 IOPS.
SanDisk has a new product... a PCIEx1 card with 8 or 16G of memory... to run in concert with magnetic drives and cache virtually your entire setup... at least the OS + nearly all apps you might have running at once. Will work like a virtual machine, but any write/saves would also be written to the hard drive. Sort of a bridge between magnetic HDs and SSD's. Sounds smart if it works well and is properly priced. Supposed to be available in early '08.
That is not clear when you put it up against RAID. Only when you consider drives one to one without RAID is that true. nitro
I don't think RAID changes the situation. RAID performance improvements come with a boat load of caveats. And of course, if you're made of money you could always put together a RAID of flash drives. If you're using RAID for high capacity then obviously SSDs can't compete. If you need performance, SSDs are very soon going to be the only game in town. Martin