[Lasher]

Has anyone had any experience with running a mud on SSDs yet? Our biggest bottleneck is disk i/o so quite excited by the potential in these, but have heard various anecdotes about reliability and how long the data can actually be retained on an SSD.

[Kylotan]

Never tried it myself, but EVE Online seems to do ok by any account.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Lasher Has anyone had any experience with running a mud on SSDs yet? Our biggest bottleneck is disk i/o so quite excited by the potential in these, but have heard various anecdotes about reliability and how long the data can actually be retained on an SSD.

I'm no SSD expert, so take what I write with a grain of salt, but....

There are multiple types of SSDs, but they kind of boil down to Flash-based vs. RAM-based. Flash-based SSDs:

• Are much cheaper than RAM SSDs.
• Read much faster than conventional harddrives at reading data (20x+ faster)
• Sometimes write faster than conventional harddrives, but sometimes write slower. Specifically, if you're writing a lot of small chunks of data they will often be slower than a conventional HD as they have to write to the drives in large chunks. The smaller the chunks of data you're writing, the bigger a problem this is.
• They become unrealiable after about 1-5 million write cycles. I have no idea how big an issue this is for you as I don't know how much writing to the drive you do.
• Is non-volatile, meaning that when it loses power it retains data.

RAM-based SSDS:

• Read from the drive at least 10x faster than a Flash SSD.
• Write to the drive well over 100x faster than Flash SSD.
• Aren't available in capacities as large as Flash SSDs.
• Are VERY expensive.
• Are physically larger than Flash SSDs of same capacity.
• Is volatile, so has to have a battery and backup system present (if power is lost the battery powers it long enough to copy the data out of the RAM-based SSD).

RAM-based SSDs are basically superior in every way for performance. Flash SSDs are becoming pretty reasonable price-wise though. My latest laptop has a 64 gig Flash SSD drive in it, for instance, and I think it only cost $400 extra or something. (And man does Windows start up quickly with it!).

A quick google search isn't showing me any reliable pricing for RAM-based SSDs, but when we looked at using SSDs for Iron Realms I remember that they were at least 25x more expensive per byte stored than Flash SSDs (which are themselves considerably more expensive per byte stored than conventional HDs). That was a couple of years ago though, and I don't know how the market has changed (I know that Flash-based SSDs have been dropping quickly in price but have no idea what has been happening to RAM-based.)

--matt

[the_logos]

Found some pricing from 2007. The RamSan 400 (RAM-based SSD), with a 128 gig capacity, was running about $90,000 for a base unit.

Ouch.

--matt

[Lasher]

Ouch! Thanks for the info.

Sounds like a RAM based SSD won't be a viable mainstream option for some time yet.

Oh well, back to trusty old zlib.

[prof1515]

Peanuts!

Oh wait, that was a comma and not a decimal point?

Damn.

[Threshold]

It has been almost a year since we looked at this.

How much have prices come down?