[ltp] Re: solid state drive?

[Laurent]

Hi,

> Write amplification has been addressed by next generation SSD's (at
> the moment the Intel SSD's are alone in the market, but I expect other
> manufacturers will coming up with competing products soon.)

The Intel SSD address one problem and create another. The first article
i linked benchmarks an Intel after several months of use. The really
bad performance is caused by the anti-amplification algo. The effect
is stronger if you use lots of small writes. i have seen the same thing
in our testlab: the performance after 2 months depends on the type of
data written. swap and ext3 + small files kills the performance faster
then ext2 + big files.

For the current generation it's a matter of erasing the blocks fast
enough. Most SSD are fast as long as the blocks written by the OS
are as big or bigger as the native block size. Ext3 journal is messy
and syncs lot lots of small blocks. That make the disc a lot slower
if you use lots of smalls files (like my email client or my dev-app).

cu