Re: Testing Sandforce SSD

On Aug 2, 2010, at 7:26 AM, Merlin Moncure wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Yeb Havinga <yebhavinga@gmail.com> wrote:
>> After a week testing I think I can answer the question above: does it work
>> like it's supposed to under PostgreSQL?
>>
>> YES
>>
>> The drive I have tested is the $435,- 50GB OCZ Vertex 2 Pro,
>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227534
>>
>> * it is safe to mount filesystems with barrier off, since it has a 'supercap
>> backed cache'. That data is not lost is confirmed by a dozen power switch
>> off tests while running either diskchecker.pl or pgbench.
>> * the above implies its also safe to use this SSD with barriers, though that
>> will perform less, since this drive obeys write trough commands.
>> * the highest pgbench tps number for the TPC-B test for a scale 300 database
>> (~5GB) I could get was over 6700. Judging from the iostat average util of
>> ~40% on the xlog partition, I believe that this number is limited by other
>> factors than the SSD, like CPU, core count, core MHz, memory size/speed, 8.4
>> pgbench without threads. Unfortunately I don't have a faster/more core
>> machines available for testing right now.
>> * pgbench numbers for a larger than RAM database, read only was over 25000
>> tps (details are at the end of this post), during which iostat reported
>> ~18500 read iops and 100% utilization.
>> * pgbench max reported latencies are 20% of comparable BBWC setups.
>> * how reliable it is over time, and how it performs over time I cannot say,
>> since I tested it only for a week.
>
> Thank you very much for posting this analysis.  This has IMNSHO the
> potential to be a game changer.  There are still some unanswered
> questions in terms of how the drive wears, reliability, errors, and
> lifespan but 6700 tps off of a single 400$ device with decent fault
> tolerance is amazing (Intel, consider yourself upstaged).  Ever since
> the first samsung SSD hit the market I've felt the days of the
> spinning disk have been numbered.  Being able to build a 100k tps
> server on relatively inexpensive hardware without an entire rack full
> of drives is starting to look within reach.

Intel's next gen 'enterprise' SSD's are due out later this year.  I have heard from those with access to to test
samplesthat they really like them -- these people rejected the previous versions because of the data loss on power
failure.

So, hopefully there will be some interesting competition later this year in the medium price range enterprise ssd
market.

>
>> Postgres settings:
>> 8.4.4
>> --with-blocksize=4
>> I saw about 10% increase in performance compared to 8KB blocksizes.
>
> That's very interesting -- we need more testing in that department...
>
> regards (and thanks again)
> merlin
>
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