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SSD and the Future

We stand poised on the brink of yet another paradigm shift in technology. This shift will be in the form of a simple device that most of us have a love/hate relationship with. This device I speak of is the internal Hard Drive, yes you heard me. For the last 24 years there has been no better media to store our prized data on than the spinning magneto platters that have grown from such simple beginnings as the 5MB hard disk made up of 50 two foot diameter magnetic disks or platters to today’s 1.5TB (that’s Terabytes to you and me, 1500 Gigabytes) 3.5 inch hard drive found in modern desktop and server platforms.

With a variety of interfaces that have spawned ever increasing speeds and opened up the door to new applications never dreamed of when storage required 200lbs of spinning metal to store only a few Megabytes of information, let’s not even talk about seek times. From early Bus connectors we arrived at the first standard storage connector known as IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics)and the SCSI or “scuzzy” (Small Computer System Interface) adapter was soon to follow with increased performance and longevity finally followed by the Serial adapters in the forms of SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) and SAS or Serial Attached SCSI which use the same connector types but different controllers and have become the newest standard in manufacturing and data storage connectivity.

Over the years we have seen seek times steadily dropping from “Let’s go get a cup of coffee while this file opens” measured best in minutes to the blistering 9ms (that’s milliseconds) of the modern 15k RPM SCSI drives, ear plugs not included. And with each successive increase in speed came and equally compelling desire to reduce cost and increase the speed even further until today we can purchase at any corner store or delicatessen a hard drive with 250+ GB of storage and an average seek time of sub 20ms for less than $.30 per Gigabyte.

How you ask, does this relate to some Paradigm shift?

Enter the SSD or Solid State Drive, no longer a disk, this data storage device has no moving parts and is nearly as exciting to look at as a brick. Let me quickly rewind to 2004 when I was first introduced to the world of SSD. At this time we at Silicon Valley Web Hosting were looking for a solution to a customer’s request for higher levels of data delivery. It seems that they were not happy with the SCSI RAID configuration that we had built them 2 years before and wanted to explore some other options for increasing their performance. Enter BitMicro http://www.bitmicro.com/ a pioneer in SSD technology that could deliver us a whopping 8GB of storage in the convenient form of an 80 pin 3.5″ SCSI drive for a mere $4500 each. These drives had a seek time at or below 1ms which was extraordinary even for SSD at the time and based on some preliminary testing I was able to determine that these drives would definitely relieve the bottle neck that our customer was seeing.

Alas, we could not justify the 30x increase in cost that this storage solution required and the plans for implementing SSD in our environment were shelved for another day. Fast forward to 2009 and we now see SSD being adopted on the desktop, sold in Laptops from Dell, HP, ASUS and many other manufacturers with seeming wide acceptance (and a few hiccups). Today a simple Google search for SSD returns thousands of hits for drives ranging in size and cost of 8GB for $70 to 512GB for $2000 from makers like OCZ, Transcend, Super Talent,  and here is where the shift is taking place. In the next two years the cost and reliability of these drives is going to equal that of the SATA and SAS drives however for the same money the performance and longevity of the Solid State Drives will make them the only option. Let’s take a look at the numbers really quick.

How SSD Stacks up

Today for $900 I can buy at my favorite outlet, Fry’s, Buy.com, NewEgg or wherever (though my butcher is not stocking these yet I am told they will be available in the next few weeks).

240GB Space

0.09ms seek time

Read speed of 800+MB per second

Write speed of 300+MB per second

This is $3.75 per GB which seems like an awful lot and in fact it is and awful lot in terms of storage but let’s remember that the latest SAS drives which offer similar data throughput but much longer seek times are not even half the price and these Solid State Drives are only 1 year old. The SAS drives are now ending 2 years on the  arket and the price is quite stable. I expect we will see the SSD’s continue on their path of price decay to somewhere around $.50 per GB or less. At which time the standard platter type Hard Drive will be replaced by the more energy efficient (we haven’t even talked about this yet) superior performing Solid State Drive. As Benchmark Reviews stated: “Solid State Drive offers tremendous performance in read and write bandwidth speeds and an exceptional 0.10 ms response time at a attainable price”.  Anandtech.com has this to say: “The world’s fastest consumer desktop hard drive, Western Digital’s 300GB VelociRaptor can access a random file somewhere on its platters in about 6.83ms; that’s pretty quick. Most hard drives will take closer to 8 or 9ms in this test. The Intel X25-M however? 0.11ms. The fastest SSDs can find the data you’re looking for in around 0.1ms. That’s an order of magnitude faster than the fastest hard drive on the market today.”

Is SSD for you?

Does this mean that SSD is right for you and your server applications today? For the most part my answer is going to be no. However if you have data that requires very high read times or if you are a performance junky like me then there is no substitute for the latest SSD drives from Intel and OCZ which demonstrate crippling performance numbers that leave even the fastest of conventional drives in the weeds.

Still, early adoption has its hazards and there are some bugs to be worked out with the sequential read/write actions found in a heavily loaded Database Application as well as data buffering where SSD demonstrates weakness that can result in “stuttering” or momentary freezes of the Operating System while the Drive recovers from data starvation.

When considering a hard drive choice we now have a new option that requires careful consideration or we risk the possibility of missing out on some very critical performance at a cost increase that may be a worthy burden.