“The issue is simple enough: if we had started with NAND flash – instead of disks – in the late 1950s, would our storage devices and software stack look like they do today?” Robin Harris reports for ZDNet. “No, of course not.”
“Over the last year, researchers have been teasing out the problems with making flash look like disks,” Harris reports. “While these problems are less of an issue for notebook and desktop users, they are a big problem for servers.”
“Recent academic research has found that the SSDs used in many all flash arrays have surprising performance issues. For example, researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Facebook and recently discovered that placing sparse arrays on SSDs cause premature wear and failure,” Harris reports. “It is also well known that SSD performance drops as the drive ages. The number of I/O threads accessing an SSD can also have large performance effects.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Much less of an issue for notebook and desktop users than for servers.
Our 11-inch MacBook Airs with PCIe-based flash storage are our favorite Macs ever! We could never go backwards to mechanical hard drives.
Regardless of their shortcomings, they’re still better than HDD’s for the consumer. I hate having to use a computer without SSD now. Even my old 2011 MBAir with only 4GB RAM works better than a newer model with an HDD.
They will get better and cheaper – we’ve not been using them that long in computer years.
Yawn. I’m sure tech will save us from not-quite-perfect tech. In the meantime, I’ll use the best solution available today – SSD.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2951864/storage/intel-micron-announce-new-3dxpoint-memory-type-thats-1000-times-faster-than-nand.html
And this article appearing just now is purely accidental, right…? no, it’s marketing by intelµn.
proof: see previous post!
I put a 1TB SSD in my early 2011 MacBook Pro.
It’s like I have a brand new laptop. That was the biggest improvement ever made by a single upgrade.
ditto my 2011 27″ iMac. The 32 GB of RAM didn’t hurt either.
Me too, same MacBook. Maxed the RAM as well to gasp, 8Gb! Yeah, it really does go like a newie.
We just had an SSD fail in my wife’s MacBook Pro.
How old is the SSD? What kind is it?
I usually tell HD users to replace them every four years, on average. I’m trying to get a sense of the crash time of various SSDs.
Do you think having a bigger capacity SSD will help do to the likelihood of re-writing any single spot to be less frequent?
No, not at all. Why do you ask?
Buy a new server every year. easy.
My sense is that this creates and incentive to move innovation along to the next storage medium, certainly for busy server usage. Here comes nanotech data storage?
Ahem. “AN incentive…”
I require caffeination.
I use several smaller SSDs for my systems and work on Mac and PC but I back up everything very often if not daily in mechanical drives. And I think for now this is the best option.
Instead of buying a large SSD I am using 250GBs drives and if any one fails I will replace just that one.
I put a Samsung 650 EVO SSD in my 2011 Mac Mini, and 16GB of RAM (yes, they go to 16.)
Best decision ever. Boot time was cut down to a third of what it was, and applications launch much more quickly, and beachball cursors occur much less often.