3 ms·

I saw those on ebay but the connector was weird also I don't need more speed, these machines will be behind 2x separate home 1Gb/s (up and down) fiber... Anoth

by bullen 5y ago

I saw those on ebay but the connector was weird also I don't need more speed, these machines will be behind 2x separate home 1Gb/s (up and down) fiber... Another thing I had to consider was power since I plan to back these up with lead-acid batteries for power outages. These drives draw 2W when active... so that is 18W for 8x (512GB) DB drives and one OS drive! Compared to the 25/32W of the 8/16-core motherboards that's alot... but mechanical drives are insane on electricity, up to 10W per drive!!! But good point, do you know what connector tese use?

wtallis 5y ago
The Optane Memory drives use a M.2 connector, keyed for carrying two lanes of PCI Express 3.0, over which they use the NVMe protocol. If you're concerned about battery life, you really shouldn't be using lots of small drives, especially when the controllers are so ancient. You'll get at least 5x the performance per Watt from a single newer flash-based SSD and much better idle power behavior. Consumer SSDs also offer much more in the way of low-power idle states than enterprise SSDs. At the extreme, you can get a $75 512GB drive that provides significantly more performance than 8x X25-Es in aggregate, while never reaching 3W power draw under load and idling at under 10mW.
- bullen 5y ago
  Sure but the 100.000 writes per bit!? To me data integrity and longevity are paramount! These have same idle power btw, but ofcourse 2W on read/write is bad but I rather use these $1000 in 2011 50nm SLC industrial drives and compress my database than buy some MLC/TLC/QLC drive made today with 14nm!
  - wtallis 5y ago
    You should be aware that SSDs perform wear leveling, so the key metric is not how many program/erase cycles the underlying flash can handle on a per-block basis, but the total amount of writes the drive can handle, usually expressed in TB or PB. Unless you have measured your own workload in enough detail to know otherwise, it is extremely unlikely you actually need to use SLC NAND. The market has almost completely abandoned SLC NAND for good reason, and your use case probably isn't that special (though if it is, I'm sure we could have an interesting conversation about it). Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that a modern TLC SSD could easily fulfill your actual write endurance and data retention requirements, because that's the conclusion that has been reached by all of the big corporations who have been using modern SSDs in production at scale.
    - bullen 5y ago
      Maybe, but I'm factoring in the time spent on maintenance at 100x the cost because that is not something I want me or my kids to have to do ever! Meaning with 5 million customers on my MMO we have 250 years of all of them playing every day with these drives. Which gives us margin!
    - gpapilion 5y ago
      The wildcard here is the garbage collection in the drive, and bad firmware with high write amplification. I’ve seen TLC devices go bad within a year where the vendor optimized for full page P/E cycles. That said these were high transaction server workloads, and typical home use would be challenged to get to that kind of wear.

by bullen 5y ago

wtallis 5y ago

The Optane Memory drives use a M.2 connector, keyed for carrying two lanes of PCI Express 3.0, over which they use the NVMe protocol. If you're concerned about battery life, you really shouldn't be using lots of small drives, especially when the controllers are so ancient. You'll get at least 5x the performance per Watt from a single newer flash-based SSD and much better idle power behavior. Consumer SSDs also offer much more in the way of low-power idle states than enterprise SSDs. At the extreme, you can get a $75 512GB drive that provides significantly more performance than 8x X25-Es in aggregate, while never reaching 3W power draw under load and idling at under 10mW.

bullen 5y ago
Sure but the 100.000 writes per bit!? To me data integrity and longevity are paramount! These have same idle power btw, but ofcourse 2W on read/write is bad but I rather use these $1000 in 2011 50nm SLC industrial drives and compress my database than buy some MLC/TLC/QLC drive made today with 14nm!
- wtallis 5y ago
  You should be aware that SSDs perform wear leveling, so the key metric is not how many program/erase cycles the underlying flash can handle on a per-block basis, but the total amount of writes the drive can handle, usually expressed in TB or PB. Unless you have measured your own workload in enough detail to know otherwise, it is extremely unlikely you actually need to use SLC NAND. The market has almost completely abandoned SLC NAND for good reason, and your use case probably isn't that special (though if it is, I'm sure we could have an interesting conversation about it). Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that a modern TLC SSD could easily fulfill your actual write endurance and data retention requirements, because that's the conclusion that has been reached by all of the big corporations who have been using modern SSDs in production at scale.
  - bullen 5y ago
    Maybe, but I'm factoring in the time spent on maintenance at 100x the cost because that is not something I want me or my kids to have to do ever! Meaning with 5 million customers on my MMO we have 250 years of all of them playing every day with these drives. Which gives us margin!
  - gpapilion 5y ago
    The wildcard here is the garbage collection in the drive, and bad firmware with high write amplification. I’ve seen TLC devices go bad within a year where the vendor optimized for full page P/E cycles. That said these were high transaction server workloads, and typical home use would be challenged to get to that kind of wear.