[AccessD] You thought your hard drive was fast...

jwcolby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Sep 28 10:07:00 CDT 2009


It's a tad outside my budget range.  However if you looked at what they did, they used a dedicated 
hardware raid controller card and essentially glued on 4 flash drives, raid0.  I already have 
dedicated hardware raid controllers, so this gives me a clue as to the performance I could achieve 
by building a 4 drive Raid0 array on my current controllers - which has been my intention anyway.

The nice thing about flash drives from a database perspective is that the Input/Output Operations 
Per Second (IOPS) is through the roof relative to any physical hard drive.

IOPS is essentially how many physical seeks the drive can perform in a second.  The number for 
rotating media is in the 20-60 range for consumer grade drives.  The number has to do with how fast 
the head can physically move between tracks as well as the rotation speed, i.e. how fast the data 
comes under the head once the head gets to the right track.

With Flash drives that stuff essentially goes out the window.  There is no physical head to move, 
nor rotating media to wait for.  Now it becomes how many blocks of data can be read, and how many 
requests for blocks of data can be processed by the processor on the flash drive.  The numbers are 
relatively astronomical.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/34003-Get-more-IOPS-per-dollar-with-SSD-2-5-drives
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/insane_ssd_performance/

Now back to reality and what I can actually afford:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=186&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=7

I actually own one 30gb Vertex which I use to drive my virtual machines, giving a 4 gb chunk to each 
VM (all they need).

My intention is to build a RAID0 with 3 or 4 of these beasties (60 gb though), and place my database 
from hell on that raid0 array.  The results should be satisfying.  Doing it this way I could start 
small and build the raid array size.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240636%2050001550%201749646481%201421541071%201421330854&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&SrchInDesc=Vertex&Page=1

I have been impatiently waiting for the price to drop which it pretty much hasn't.  I bought the 30 
gig drive about a year ago and the prices haven't budged since.  I think that the market is buying 
all of these things up at the current price.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com


Dan Waters wrote:
> Perhaps this would really help with your large databases!
> 
> I like the spec for Cooling: 'Custom Danger with Liquid Cooling'!
> 
> Dan
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
> Sent: Monday, September 28, 2009 7:19 AM
> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
> Subject: [AccessD] You thought your hard drive was fast...
> 
> 
> http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&number=1&artpage=3979&articID=91
> 1
> 



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