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Samsung Announces Key-Value SSD Prototype
- xzmmd 7y agoEh, what a title. Wouldn't it be better if it said key-value ?
- StavrosK 7y agoMaybe it's a cheap SSD that's important for Samsung's business.
- mjevans 7y agoOr a slash; key/value or an indirect key->value. I was really hoping they were going to finally be selling an SSD that was an order of magnitude less costly than spinning rust. That's about what it would take for the tradeoffs in reliability to be worth it.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoQLC-based SSDs are coming very close to parity with cost/capacity of traditional hard drives. Terabyte SSDs are now sub-$100, which isn't that bad at all. Note that the reliability concerns about SSDs have seemed mostly overblown, after years of abuse and testing.
- mjevans 7y agoI've seen the prices on QLC SSDs. I feel like currently they MIGHT reach the same price as spinning rust. At that point it's a trade between seek time and reliability. Within that context I still see spinning rust as the longer term archive / bulk storage media. The QLC storage might provide a good precaching layer in more complex systems, and might eventually reach it's seemingly intended price point (rather than being a small discount to TLC drives that are more mature and higher performing). The 'order of magnitude' I'm hoping for might be as small as binary (half) for me to consider it... but at 10X the storage per price it's where I hope something with no moving parts and less drive housing should be.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThe reliability of flash is fine for everything except leaving unplugged for years. And if you want to do that you don't use drives, you use tapes. It's not a tradeoff at all when you compare to hard drives.
- paulmd 7y agoWhining about titles is white-noise that contributes zero value to the discussion, and it's absolutely rampant on HN.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 7y agoIt definitely is not, because mods often change bad titles when it is pointed out. Which also just happened in this submission.
- paulmd 7y agoThe fact that the mods humor you doesn't make it not white noise, and in fact it makes them part of the problem since it encourages it. It is incredibly tedious to see people arguing about titles on every single topic instead of actual discussion. On some topics with less discussion it is literally the entirety of the discussion.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoAre you saying that having clear and accurate titles for submissions has zero value? I think most of HN (and even the official guidelines here) would disagree very strongly.
- chadash 7y agoCan someone tell me what the use case for this would be?
- ricardobeat 7y agoYou can see for yourself in the third paragraph. Streamlines key-value storage and might replace database backends.
- mruts 7y agoWhy is this worth paying a premium for, though? Maybe a SQL SSD could get some adoption, but a simple KV store? How would that ever be a bottleneck (they are relatively easy to make blazing fast, unlike SQL) in your application? How many people/corporations actually want something like this?
- paggle 7y agoThe hash table for mapping keys to values will be implemented in hardware on the device, rather than needing to come off the SSD to the CPU.
- fyfy18 7y agoNow your SSD can be web scale too!
- jasonhansel 7y agoThis is huge. It's been obvious for a long time that the standard block-device abstraction isn't a great fit for SSDs. This development finally gives us a better abstraction that will immensely improve performance of a wide variety of applications (possibly even SQL databases).
- BubRoss 7y agoWhy isn't a block device a good fit for an SSD?
- wtallis 7y agoNAND flash has two inherent sizes: pages and erase blocks. NAND flash pages are several times larger than the 4kB virtual memory pages that your OS prefers to deal with, and erase blocks are a few orders of magnitude larger than that. There's a lot of complexity involved in making it possible to do 512-byte or 4kB IO to NAND flash.
- BubRoss 7y agoBlock sizes can often be set to at least 65KB, does this not help the problem?
- wtallis 7y agoIt helps a bit, but keep in mind that just because your filesystem is doing most of its allocation in 64kB chunks, doesn't mean it is issuing only 64kB IOs to the drive itself.
- sliken 7y agoAdditionally it doesn't mean that your 64KB chunks aligned to your current partition are also aligned with the 64KB boundary of the underlying block device.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoWhat's the advantage of this over a simple hardware interface (which should be really simple since I thought NVMe was basically just a PCIe node) that directly exposes the flash and then let the application/filesystem/whatever layer handle it?
- Quenty 7y agoThe article explains it. You offload a lot of the processing required by the CPU onto the SSD, and you minimize read writes for the SSD architecture, reducing emulation requirements.
- zzzcpan 7y agoAdding more dedicated hardware that does what you can do on the hardware you already have is not necessarily an advantage.
- amerine 7y agoSpecial purpose silicon is almost always faster and offloading stacks of IO cycles from the main cores is definitely a great thing.
- comboy 7y agoLatency matters. You can execute instructions much faster from firmware on the SSD and higher abstraction level instruction usually translates to many low level instructions.
- brirec 7y agoNot necessarily, but often enough that the most expensive part in a mid range or high end gaming PC is an accelerator card meant to offload certain forms of computation that the CPU can't do as fast... Or perhaps the h.264/h.265 codecs built into modern CPUs and GPUs? And this isn't at all a new phenomenon, either. We've been using accelerators and coprocessors (as they were often originally known) for decades.
- tyingq 7y ago
- aspaceman 7y agoThis is really cool! I find it very interesting that moving the key-value store directly into the hardware could result in performance gains. I suppose these wouldn't be as generally useful?
- mpsys 7y agoSNIA KV stack gets rid of the filesystem, and the disk is directly accessible by applications through the API. Hence, it won't be generally useful. The target is a very specific segment of the SSD market.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThis continues the trend we see in processors, that in a post-Moore's law environment, rather than trying to push physical limits for performance improvements, we're branching out into hardware optimized for specific purposes. Very neat to see it on the storage side, and something I don't think anyone could fathom back in the spinning disk days.
- cm2187 7y agoCISC is back with a vengeance!
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoHonestly, this is more like the revenge of the mainframes. Having enough logic in all your storage and peripherals that the hardware itself presented a nice, directly usable API was the thing that differentiated mainframes in the era when minicomputer were cheaper and started getting faster cpus. (That and "no-one's ever gotten fired for buying IBM".)
- bitterchicken 7y agoThis was my impression as well.
- LASR 7y agoThis is a sort of punctuated optimization that is natural in any technology. When a fundamental technology is evolving rapidly, not much effort is put into optimization. It instead goes into keeping the momentum of evolving the fundamental technology. When it hits a physical limitation, everyone scrambles to now optimize. Until the next generation of fundamental tech shows up and evolves rapidly again. Think about air travel and how every airline is now all about fuel efficiency. A single new technology eg: a new battery chemistry that is say, 2x as energy dense as the best right, now comes along, electric air propulsion will become a major thing. And airlines will be scrambling to offer faster, quieter options that may not necessarily be the most efficient.
- jerf 7y ago
- gitgudnubs 7y agoOk.... I can just store the mapping of content key to blkid. Then I can load the mapping into memory. Then I have a key value store on an SSD using cheap, available hardware.
- losteric 7y agoObviously, key-value stores aren't a new thing... but pushing that abstraction to hardware offers far better latency.
- gitgudnubs 7y agoNo it doesn't. The SSD lookup is measured in microseconds. The memory lookup for the mapping to blkid is measured in nanoseconds. Unless they're putting some expensive, power-hungry CAM in these devices, they're doing exactly what I described above. The only real advantages could be variably-sized values, and offloading CPU cycles. But a map lookup isn't exactly expensive, especially for an I/O heavy system. And variably-sized blocks aren't particularly relevant, since DBs are pretty good at packing in data. There's not much there to justify an unusual, expensive device that's far more complicated than the alternative.
- wtallis 7y ago> The SSD lookup is measured in microseconds. The memory lookup for the mapping to blkid is measured in nanoseconds. Some people care about write performance, too.
- gitgudnubs 7y agoIt's the same in both cases. You write a dirty mapping in memory. You persist the value, and you persist the mapping. Then you flip the dirty bit.
- mpsys 7y agoMoving the abstraction to hardware level gets rid of the multi-layer indirections that maps the key-value pairs to actual physical page. It replaces 3 layers of mappings with 1 layer. That reduces CPU load caused by the multi-layer indirections of software KV stores.
- kissgyorgy 7y agoSo now we will have yet another computer IN THE SSD too? Is this a good idea? https://boingboing.net/2018/11/12/cpus-in-your-cpus.html https://boingboing.net/2018/11/12/cpus-in-your-cpus.html
- dbalan 7y agoIt won't be much different than what the current generation storage devices contain. You already need to upgrade SSD firmware these days. Linux fwupmgr has support for few of them.
- writepub 7y agoThere is already a computer in the SSD, replete with DRAM, multcore CPU, custom math acceleration (depending on SSD design and vendor), etc.
- berbec 7y agoThe HP EX920 has a dual-core Arm Cortex.[1] The Samsung 970 Pro has the "Samsung Phoenix NVMe controller". 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hp-ex920-ssd,5527.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hp-ex920-ssd,5527.html
- duskwuff 7y agoThis has been the case for a while already. Even spinning-platter hard disks had some reasonably powerful CPUs to implement caching, bad-block remapping, and SMART data retention (among other features); SSDs pushed this to another level by demanding higher performance and more complex remapping. Chances are that this Samsung device isn't even using different hardware from their standard SSDs -- just different firmware. [1]: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoI try not to think about the fact that horrible proprietary firmware is in everything now.
- wtallis 7y ago
- psanford 7y agoInteresting. I remember a short period where Seagate was really hyping their own ethernet connected key/value hard drives back in 2015[1]. It seems like that project died and this appears to be a completely different API (and not ethernet based). [1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/17/seagate_kinect_open_thing/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/17/seagate_kinect_open...
- gitgudnubs 7y agoNetwork attached HDDs were killed by ethernet. In their infinite wisdom, ethernet decided there was no need for speeds between 1GbE and 10GbE. They finally caved to reality with 40GbE, 25GbE, and 50GbE. They eventually ratified 2.5GbE, but it was too late for network drives. The transfer rate of an HDD is well over 1Gbps.
- oarsinsync 7y ago> In their infinite wisdom, ethernet decided there was no need for speeds between 1GbE and 10GbE. They finally caved to reality with 40GbE, 25GbE, and 50GbE. I’m not sure that’s accurate. There were no intermediate steps to get to 10GbE, it was a straight jump from 1GbE and it was relatively easy. To get to 40GbE, it involved running four lanes of 10GbE. To get to 100GbE, it involved running four lanes of 25GbE. 50GbE is just two lanes of 25GbE. We’ve gone from a single serialised stream to multiple parallel streams in order to reach next order speeds. This is magnified when you start looking at 400GbE and 800GbE services that operate on 8 lanes (QSFP-DD or the confusingly named OSFP).
- jdnenej 7y ago10gbit networking gear is massively more expensive than 1gbit
- amiga-workbench 7y agoIts finally beginning to fall in price, Microtik are doing relatively inexpensive routers with 10gig SFP ports.
- umvi 7y agoMaybe slightly off-topic but I've always struggled to understand the appeal of key-value stores like Redis and DynamoDB. I tried using it once as a substitute for shared memory in an embedded device, but you lose a lot of information (like type) and it seems like you can't represent or query complex data structures like nested structs without serializing it out to some data format first and then storing that in in the store (but at that point it's starting to get slow/complex and you can't easily examine what's in the database and so it's easier to keep using shared memory). But clearly I'm missing something because everybody loves them and uses them. Is this a technology I would only use when building websites at scale or something?
- Nican 7y agoRead about: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-on-rocksd/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-on-rocksd/ https://blog.yugabyte.com/how-we-built-a-high-performance-document-store-on-rocksdb/ https://blog.yugabyte.com/how-we-built-a-high-performance-do... https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/04/30/a-look-at-myrocks-performance/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/04/30/a-look-at-myrocks-pe...
- adventured 7y agoStack Exchange as one example aggressively uses Redis as a caching layer for practically its entire service. Redis is very fast, dependable and relatively easy to use. The alternative, other than a competing product, is pretty much that you have to write your own custom replacement Redis in some manner. That might be fine at a small scale for fun or in an experimental product that isn't meant to go into production; otherwise you want something well proven, that many other engineers you can hire are likely to have experience with (it's hard to over-emphasize that last point). https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69164/does-stack-exchange-use-caching-and-if-so-how/69172 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/69164/does-stack-ex...
- nickdandakis 7y agoKey-value stores satisfy a set of use-cases, as do NoSQL, and SQL. Key-value is great when you have a key-value pair that you'd like to cache. Specifically in web workloads, maybe you'd like to cache the API response (value) to a certain API query (key) such that its returned without processing power from your backend. Or maybe user permissions per action, where they don't really change as they're reliant on the user's role. I'm not entirely sure what a valid use-case would be for an embedded device, but if there's any kind of SQL query you would make on an embedded device that returns a response that hardly changes, you might also spin up some kind of key-value store such that it's returned without (well, faster than) SQL query time. It probably doesn't make sense to completely replace a SQL database if you're trying to represent relational data.
- pinewurst 7y agoI see these as pointless technology because you still have to deal with data protection explicitly at a higher level. Given that, what does KV per drive really get me?
- zzzcpan 7y agoYou'll get benchmarks that show higher numbers compared to non-KV SSDs and Samsung may use them in its marketing. But yes, key-value APIs are not going to make durability (and security) any easier. It's easier with lower level APIs, i.e. raw flash or some primitive mapping around raw flash, not higher level APIs.
- datavirtue 7y agoCool. Hopefully they allow me to duplicate keys with different values.
- geophile 7y agoI don’t understand the comments saying that this obsoletes databases, or that this is a good substrate for relational databases. The interface is for random access. Quite a few database optimizations depend on sequential access, I.e. accessing records in key order following a random access. This is why B-trees are so important. Sequential access in key order does not appear to be a possibility with this technology.
- the_duke 7y ago> The interface is for random access. I'm not sure where you are getting this idea. How keys are organized would be up to the device, and devices could support multiple schemes. Clustering keys in a sorted order and fast in-order iteration seems like an essential requirement. Just scanning over the specification [1], I see an iterator interface for key groups (6.4) and a setting for ordering (5.4.3) Edit: just to clarify, I agree that this would in no way obsolete databases. But software DBs could utilize key/value disks internally. [1] https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/technical_work/KVSAPI/Key%20Value%20Storage%20API%20v1.0.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/technical_work/KVSA...
- zokier 7y agoSee slide 43 here https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC/2017/presentations/Object_ObjectDriveStorage/Ki_Yang_Seok_Key_Value_SSD_Explained_Concept_Device_System_and_Standard.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC/2017/presentati...
- the_duke 7y agoVery interesting presentation. Slide 43 is for write performance though. RocksDB does a lot of clever things with writes, like delayed and batched flushing with a WAL for recovery. Would be interesting how that benchmark was written. Other slides with read benchmarks show very significant performance improvements. But comparing directly to a software DB seems inappropriate to me anyway. We can't expect (and definitely wouldn't want) a hard disk to offer something as complex as RocksDB/LLDB/etc. I would rather imagine that the software DBs start taking advantage of key/value disks internally.
- algaeontoast 7y agoThis is incredibly interesting. Can't wait to see more application specific NVME hardware come out!
- int0x80 7y agoHow is this exposed to userspace? What interface?
- mpsys 7y agoIt is accessible directly to applications through the SNIA KVS API (and Samsung has it's own API as well). There is no filesystem in the middle, if you are using the KV-controller.
- Androider 7y agoHow would you do a backup of this KV store if it's not exposed as a filesystem or block device? You wouldn't (it's for ephemeral caching?), or you'd just walk the entire keyspace?
- zzzcpan 7y agoThere are iterators in the API I believe.
- lucas_membrane 7y agoBut who will be the first to use a Key-Value SSD to implement a file system?
- wtallis 7y agoSamsung has already published a Ceph backend for their KV SSD, so you can use CephFS to get a POSIX filesystem backed by these drives.
- perspective1 7y agoOn the one hand I think this is very cool. On the other, I think it's funny that Redis can fit in my RAM and not on my SSD.
- ahupp 7y agoThis is a cool idea, and I'm excited to see what kind of perf wins it produces. It seems like the other solution would be to expose all the details of the SSD to the OS: wear leveling, GC etc, and make that a driver concern. Probably a lot harder to get right, but more debuggable and more opportunities to tune for your specific workload.
- wtallis 7y agoThat's what the Open Channel SSD concept is. It's been getting a lot of attention in the past few years, but it seems like many potential users still balk at the idea of having that thin of an abstraction layer. The open-channel stuff has been influencing the addition of other new features to the NVMe protocol that expose most of the information an open-channel SSD would, but don't break compatibility by requiring the host to use that information. Several vendors are also supporting the Zoned Storage concept of making SSDs that have similar IO constraints to shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives. Those constraints aren't a perfect match for the true characteristics of NAND flash memory, but it does handle the problem of large erase blocks.
- elevenbits 7y agoWould be interesting if this evolves into a full filesystem implementation in hardware (they talk about Object Drive but aren't focused on that yet). Some interesting future possibilities: - A cross-platform filesystem that you could read/write from Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android etc. Imagine having a single disk that could boot any computer operating system without having to manage partitions and boot records! - Significantly improved filesystem performance as it's implemented in hardware. - Better guarantees of write flushing (as SSD can include RAM + tiny battery) that translate into higher level filesystem objects. You could say, writeFile(key, data, flush_full, completion) and receive a callback when the file is on disk. All independent of the OS or kernel version you're running on. - Native async support is a huge win Already the performance is looking insane. Would love to get away from the OS dictating filesystem choice and performance.
- oarsinsync 7y ago> Would love to get away from the OS dictating filesystem choice and performance. Not wishing to be a wet blanket, but do you really believe having disk manufacturers dictating filesystem choice and performance will actually be an improvement?
- tdb7893 7y agoThey already have a huge impact on performance and in my experience most people don't care which filesystem they use as long as the performance is good.
- elevenbits 7y agoAbsolutely. SSDs have gone from 100+MB/s random (already a huge improvement over the spinning rust of the time) to maxing out PCIe x4. Over the same timeline, what have filesystems done? - Apple made APFS, which seems to show roughly the same performance as HFS+ on SSD hardware. Some benchmarks show faster, some show slower, but it's certainly no 5X improvement across the board. - btrfs and ZFS have some amazing features, but remain niche and don't seem to yet have wide deployment. Linux distros seem locked on EXT4. - Windows has NTFS (and ReFS for the server) At a consumer level, I care about: a) reliability b) performance c) power. SSD manufacturers so far have delivered hugely on all three. I'd love to see how much more they could deliver by moving a lot of filesystem functionality onto the device. Sure the first few iterations might suck like early SSDs did, but in a few years?
- lgats 7y agoWhat would a RAID-equivelant setup look like over this archetecture?
- notyourday 7y agoRAID driver would use it as a retarded object store based block device. The absolutely last thing that any fs designer would want is to outsource to hardware vendor implementation of anything other than a basic operation. We already saw this in hardware RAID which sucks donkey balls compared to software RAID. This is a pure value add play in a commodity market.
- mpsys 7y agoKV-SSD replaces the filesystem with Abstract Device Interface(ADI), that sits between the KV API exposed to the applications directly and the KV device driver. According my understanding, although some modern filesystems combines RAID and the file system, these are separate independent abstractions. However, it would be interesting to explore how RAID will work with KV-SSDs. You can take a look at a commercial implementation of Samsung's Mission Peak system to benchmark KV-SSDs (I am not sure whether the following one is an officially approved implementation or not) - https://www.broadberry.com/performance-storage-servers/cyberstore-136nf1-nvme-ssd https://www.broadberry.com/performance-storage-servers/cyber...
- sliken 7y agoWell the general idea of a key value store is you are referring to variable size values not 4k sectors. So you'd need a higher level service to ensure object redundancy across SSDs and likely a scrub function to make sure that key/values that you expect are still there, still readable, and have the correct value.
- skissane 7y agoIBM mainframes had key-indexed hard disks back in the 1960s – CKD (and later ECKD). Each disk sector could have a key field at the start, and rather than addressing disk sectors by physical location, you could tell the hard disk "give me the data of sector with key 1234", and it would go search for that sector and return it to you. (I think, you still had to tell it what disk track to search on, and it just did a sequential scan of the disk track...) A lot more primitive than this, of course, but funny how old ideas eventually become new again.
- vilaca 7y agoThank you for sharing that. Reading material for tonight ;) I googled ECKD and it seems it is still in use and support by IBM (maybe through emulation).
- skissane 7y agoIt really only still exists for legacy reasons. The original indexed file format under MVS, ISAM, heavily relied on the physical hardware keys on (E)CKD disks. In the 1970s, IBM replaced ISAM with VSAM, which didn't use that physical key feature and handled all the keys in software – and it was actually faster. (I don't know if the reason for it being faster was due to some fundamental flaw with the underlying idea, or just due to limitations of the particular implementation.) (Despite being deprecated, IBM continued to support ISAM until the mid-2000s, when they finally removed it from the operating system.) IIRC, the legacy PDS (partitioned data set) format also uses it, but not the newer PDSE 1.0 or PDSE 2.0. (PDSE = partitioned data set extended). (PDS is like an archive file format, for object code it functions similar to .a files on Unix, for source code it was used to make up for the fact that originally MVS didn't really have the concept of directories, so keeping all your program's source modules in a single dataset was more convenient.) I think the mainframe filesystem (VTOC) also uses it a bit. There's probably a few other random things in z/OS that still need it, but the newer stuff (VSAM, PDSE, HFS/zFS, etc) doesn't really use it. I think if IBM really wanted to, they could add support to z/OS for running on industry-standard FBA disks instead of ECKD. (They did the same thing to VSE all the way back in the 1980s.) I think the main reason they don't do it, is not technical, but commercial – mainframes needing special SANs helps keep their storage business alive, if mainframes could work on industry standard SANs, they'd face more competition in that area.
- thinkmassive 7y agoHow does the cost of these compare with existing SSDs?
- wtallis 7y agoSame hardware, different firmware. Cost will be basically the same if the idea catches on.
- myself248 7y agoAs someone on the periphery of comp-sci my whole life, I find myself wondering, is this similar in concept to content-addressable memory?
- goldenkey 7y agoNo, because we are addressing it by key.
- DonHopkins 7y agoHow flexible are the limits on key and data size? I imagine a lot of apps would need more than just 255 byte keys and 2MB values. Is there an efficient way to virtually increase the value size, at least?
- jandrewrogers 7y agoThese have been built many times, and I have even been involved in the design of one (that was ultimately scrapped). The value proposition of these products is not what many people seem to be assuming, so I will elaborate. Under the hood, most implementations are just mildly modified LevelDB/RocksDB/etc running on an ARM processor. In theory, there should be no performance advantages to embedding the storage engine this way. But there is -- back to that in a moment. Not only will a properly optimized storage engine run just as fast on the CPU but there are performance advantages to doing so for applications like databases. If you are designing a state-of-the-art storage engine for complex and high-performance storage work, these devices are not for you, you can always do better with bare storage. The key phrase is "properly optimized". The I/O scheduling and management underlying a typical popular KV storage engine is actually quite far from properly optimized for modern storage hardware, with significantly adverse consequences for performance and durability. The extent to which this is true is significantly underestimated by many developers. From the perspective of the storage manufacturers, more and more theoretical performance of their product is being wasted because the most popular open source storage engines are incapable of taking advantage of it as a matter of architecture. The kind of architectural surgery required to address this is correctly seen as something you can't upstream to the main open source code base. The software in these devices is typically an open source storage engine where they ripped out the I/O scheduler, storage management, and whatnot, replacing it with one properly optimized to take advantage of the hardware. This could be done in software but storage companies aren't in that business. Their hope is that people will use these devices instead of LevelDB etc, with the promise of superior performance that justifies higher cost. In practice, these devices never seem to do well in the market. People that are using the KV stores these are intended to replace are the kind of people that do not have particularly performance-sensitive applications, and therefore won't pay a premium. And it adds no value, and has some significant disadvantages, for companies with serious storage engine implementation chops or software storage-engines that are well-optimized for this kind of hardware. tl;dr: These are like in-memory databases. A simple way to improve the performance of applications instead of investing in hardcore software design and implementation but providing no other value.
- ntoshev 7y ago> The kind of architectural surgery required to address this is correctly seen as something you can't upstream to the main open source code base. Why is this?
- eleitl 7y agoOne of the comments to the article mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Databa...
- azurespace 7y agoA hello from the Samsung SSD developer :)
- bvinc 7y agoI understand how it can achieve better performance by bypassing the file system. But I'd like to compare this to hypothetical key-value software that stores its data directly on a partition (instead of in files). Isn't this essentially the same thing? The only difference that I can see is that the software would be much harder to update, and you can offload some CPU on to the processor on the drive. Am I looking at this correctly? I don't get why you would want this to be a hardware device.
- cellular 7y agoThey need to make write once ssd /usb drives. So you can backup photos and not accidentally delete or be ransom-wared for them!