RAID With Flash Hard Drives

Congratulations - according to the article SSDs are also power generators because their power requirements are 30-400% below the energy consumption of traditional 2.5" hard drives. If an SSD consumed nothing it would be 100% less than some HDs.

Excellent stuff and this is only the first release.

What we needs is OS's and applications that can take advantage of the specific benefits of each memory device. I would want to store my OS and applications on a pair of these for lightning load times and have a drive for the data files and windows cache and system files that change.

The problem with the windows operating systems seems to be the huge ammount of disk activity and swapping of data that always seems to be going on even when you lots of memory.

Somewhere in April 2007 I talk sandisk in providing me with a 25" 32 Mb SSD disk to hold a experiment upgrading older PC's.
Allthough we had to pay approximately € 350,- (and that was with a good discount as I agreed to share the results with SanDisk) SanDisk provided us with the drive and I have it running in a older 2.4 Ghz Intel based HP330D PC since approx. June 2007.

My idea was that since graphic and CAD programs are paging heavily to disk when handeling bigger files (Autocad is doing this anyway) one could speed up this process by using a SSD since the transfer rates to disk are much much faster.

By upgrading the older PC's with a SSD we could avoid replacing those older PC's and keep them runnin for a other 2 years.
basically saving 50% on the hardware budget for the coming two years.
Just before I tried the SSD I bought two new HP xw4400 machines @ € 1740 each, just so you know what the difference in budget is).
I thought that thee size of the SSD (32Gb) would
not be a problem as data is kept on the server, one only needs space for the OS and programs.
This proved not completely to be true as when I wanted to install the new Adobe CS3 suite, (a shocking 15 Gb on disk, I could only install the parts that I needed from the CS3 (I didn't calculate with that CS3 update).
This problem however would not have occured when I would have gone for the 64Gb version of the SSD (And as announced by SanDisk, 128 Gb versions would be available soon)

So I started the experiment with the SSD, installed it on the SATA and did a clean install of OS and all programs.
And ........

....WITH SOME AMAZING RESULTS.......

Where I used to have the routine:
"turn on my PC in the morning and go and make a cup of coffee while waiting to log in to the server"
.....this is no more (I might have cut myself seriously in my fingers there)
The start-up time is simular (if not faster then)
the brand new HP xw4400's(OS WinXP pro 64bit) and my coffee will have to wait till I checked mail etc.

Running Autocad, Adobe CS3 or 3DSVIZ with seriously big files is not a problem anymore the paging out to disk is not noticable while working.
The small size of the disk does has some influance here as one have to leave 10Gb free for the swap files (that's the reason why I couldn't install the Adobe CS3, So if anyone wants to do the same go for the 64Gb SSD, and remember the Data has to be kept externally from the workstation, or put a big second HDD in).
There is also a big advantage in the disk maintenance as the SSD doesn't slow down due to defragmentation where this is seriously noticable with HDD's

I did run a PCmark05 (gained about 300 points)
however this doesn't measure the user experience
specifically on the issue of working with programs that page out to disk. Here I only can give you my user experience and that gained about 500%

I did ask support from SanDisk in properly measuring the gained speed and offered to share
all results but that is where I feel a bit let down by SanDisk as they didn't even respond to my proposal to assist me in measuring.

If you would ask me if I would buy a SanDisk SSD again to do the same, my answer is definitly...
.... YES .... but then at least 64Gb

I have three 64Gb SSD on my whishlist to upgrade
the remaining HPDX330D's.

I will not do it with the 5 older compaq machines,
(I find them major hardware trouble stations, burning out MoBo's and graphics, etc.) and the rising demand in hardware requirments of the software doesn't justify upgrading them with SSD's
I'll replace them with HP xw4400's (two each time)

However my priority at the moment is to get the network under CAT6 and Gigabyte ready as I think I can reach the most speed gain there for everyone. (can not figure out if to buy this bloody expensive 3com 48 port (€ 2500 ??) switch or the mor DIY netgear 24 port gigabyte switch( only € 700 ?)


Nico Ketel
Stephen Carr Architects
Ireland
nico@scarchitects.ie
http://www.scarchitects.ie

Special quote:
It is a hard world out there for the NOT it-specialist in smaller company's who get the responsibility over the company's hardware policy. ))))

uhhhh...... that should be 2.5" SSD at the start........ I would know where and how to fit a 25 inch one.........

maybe an other brilliant Idea building a 25" should hold a 10000 TeraByte (what would that be called anyway )))))

One other addition to my experience:
At home I recently tried a raptor (YEAH, YEAH GAMING, I admit) but even that delay's on the access time, now I didn't really compare the SSD with the raptor however I feel it is fair to say that:

When comparing mechanical drives to solid state drives the solid state drive will always win based on the acces time of the disk.
That's the core of the problem I tried to solve.

And I think I've proofed that with a practical field test over the past few months in the office.