mgerdts

6 ms·

31.
by mgerdts 9mo ago
Per the definition of volatile write cache in the standard I quoted, pretty much any drive TLC drive in the hyperscalar, datacenter, or enterprise product lineup will have great write performance. They have a DRAM cache that is battery-back
32.
by mgerdts 9mo ago
It seems pointless to issue flush commands when writing to an NVMe drive with a direct IO implementation that functions properly. The NVMe spec says: > 6.8 Flush command > … > If a volatile write cache is not present or not enabled
33.
by mgerdts 9mo ago
The original idea of boot environments in Solaris came from Live Upgrade, which worked at least as far back as Solaris 8. Live upgrade was not part of Solaris, rather it was an addon that came from the services or enterprise support parts o
34.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
This article is a great read explaining how this trap happens. https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
35.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
Datacenter storage will generally not be using M.2 client drives. They employ optimizations that win many benchmarks but sacrifice on consistency multiple dimensions (power loss protection, write performance degrades as they fill, perhaps o
36.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
I just stumbled across this: > Native NVMe is now generally available (GA) with an opt-in model (disabled by default as of October’s latest cumulative update for WS2025). https://www.elevenforum.com/t/announcing-nati
37.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
This article is talking about SATA SSDs, not HDDs. While the NVMe spec does allow for MVMe HDDs, it seems silly to waste even one PCIe lane on a HDD. SATA HDDs continue to make sense.
38.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
In addition to my other comments about parallel IO and unbuffered IO, be aware that WS2022 has (had?) a rather slow NVMe driver. It has been improved in WS2025.
39.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
Robocopy has options for unbuffered IO (/J) and parallel operations (/MT:N) which could make it go much faster. Performing parallel copies is probably the big win with less than 10 Gb/s of network bandwidth. This will allow S
40.
by mgerdts 10mo ago
A workload that uses only a fraction of such system can be corralled onto a single socket or portion thereof and use local memory through the use of cgroups. Most likely other workloads will also run on this machine. They can be similarly b
41.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
> You’re also missing an important factor: Many drives now reserve some space that cannot be used by the consumer so they have extra space to work with. This is called factory overprovisioning. I think it is safe to say that all drives h
42.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
This article misses several important points. - Consumer drives like Samsung 980 Pro and WD SN 850 Black use TLC as SLC when about 30+% of the drive is erased. At this time you a burst write a bit less than 10% of the drive capacity at 5 GB
43.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
Is there a market for ridiculously loud generators?
44.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
I’ve had many very kind people help me throughout my life. In most cases there was no clear immediate reward for them. Maybe there was immediate return - joy in sharing one’s craft or the satisfaction of passing on good will they received s
45.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
I don’t think that having worked at Sun gives you much of a leg up on Triton (cloud platform). Running Triton does require specialized knowledge, but there are decent docs, IRC, and commercial support available. Triton uses SmartOS as the o
46.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
I have severe hearing loss in my right ear and no to mild hearing loss in the left. AirPods Pro 2 make it so that I feel like I can hear in stereo while streaming without resorting to setting the balance 90% right and jacking the volume. In
47.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
At a minimum, these folks do. https://mnx.io/ They like it enough that they bought this business from Samsung, who previously developed and supported it through their subsidiary, Joyent. I worked for Joyent for a few years
48.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
A drive that supports Secure Instant Erase should be encrypting all data. When the SEI function is invoked (“nvme format -s 2”, “hdparm —-security-erase”) they key is thrown away and replaced with a new one. Similar implementations exist fo
49.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
I think it is solidigm that has started to argue that with a 128 TB QLC drive constant writes at the maximum write rate will hit the drive’s endurance limit at about 4.6 years. The perf/TB of these drives is better than HDDs. The cost
50.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
In ye olde days, drivers wrestling with maps were also criticized as being distracted and dangerous. Having been a driver in ye olde days in situations where a map was needed, I can confidently say that GPS initiated while stopped and used
51.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
For those who have no idea what Plus1bus is, it is probably Plur1bus. The title in this submission needs to be fixed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(TV_series)
52.
by mgerdts 11mo ago
The other way to look at it is that it’s a waste of RAM to put even a minimal boot disk in RAM. It really depends on which you value more. The biggest value of this approach is that you are sure that every boot runs the latest OS image. Tha
53.
by mgerdts 1y ago
Soapy water (dish soap) in a spray bottle works wonders. Once they are wet and bubbly they can’t fly, making it safe to knock them to the ground and squish them. If you happen to have the spray bottle in hand while they are flying at you, a
54.
by mgerdts 1y ago
This is hobby project I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. It’s way larger than a hobby project, though. I think the key to making it horizontally scalable is to allow each writable dataset to be managed by a single node at a time. W
55.
by mgerdts 1y ago
If your entire system is connected via RDMA networks (rather common in HPC) I would not worry at all about latency. If you are buying NICs and switches that are capable of 100Gb or better, there’s a reasonable chance they support RoCE.
56.
by mgerdts 1y ago
Corn fields have already killed biodiversity. Get rid of the ethanol mandate, replace gas cars with electric, replace corn fields with solar fields with an understory of native plants. The electrified car fleet will use no fossil fuels and
57.
by mgerdts 1y ago
Get rid of the ethanol mandate. Replace those acres of corn with solar panels and an understory of native plants. One likely biased source I read a while back said that about 1/3 of this land would be sufficient to power all the cars a
58.
by mgerdts 1y ago
One thing that’s interesting with servers built with these cpus is that any M.2 drives tend to use the PCIe Gen 3 lanes. If there are two drives, one is likely x4 with the other x2. If you want fast boot drives it is important to pay attent
59.
by mgerdts 1y ago
I remember seeing another strategy where a remote block device was (lazily?) mirrored to a local SSD. The mirror was configured such that reads from the local device were preferred and writes would go to both devices. I think this was done
60.
by mgerdts 1y ago
Is Intel still working on it? Open-CAS bdev support was nearly removed from SPDK at a time when Intel still employed a SPDK development and QA team. Huawei stepped in to offer support to keep it alive, preventing its removal. I’ve been und

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