Reply to: Laptop SSD Harddrives

[TheFaQQer]

Has anyone here upgraded their laptop hard drive to a SSD?
And if so do you think it was worth the bother?

In answer to your second question, what problem are you trying to solve?

As Jonathan Lewis wrote in 2007, reducing the time it takes to perform physical IO may actually decrease the response time (linky). Or it may have no noticeably effect, as Kevin Closson notes in his blog (linky). Or it could improve performance somewhat.

If you are after some kind of performance improvement, then does the ROI make sense - if you are spending 20x the cost of a HDD on a SDD, are you expecting (and is it realistic) to get a 20x improvement? I suspect that you aren't going to get that kind of improvement - it depends on what you are really using your laptop for.

There is a new white paper on Toolbox for IT today called "Increase Application Performance With Solid State Disk" which might be worth a read - I haven't read it though.

HTH.

[TheFaQQer]

Maybe I will as at the time we were also running Oracle for MVS using these disks. Then again he's probably only conversant in Intel systems and has no knowledge of other hardware.

Post it as a question on asktom.oracle.com when he is taking questions.

[TheFaQQer]

Some info:

SSDs are now creating a new market and have found new life, with the primary use being a database accelerator (Oracle, DB2, SQL, Informix, and Sybase), as databases are typically the most I/O-intensive of all applications.

Which is essentially what I said - Oracle recommend using it as a supplemental cache to reduce the need to access disk when the SGA gets full.

[darmstadt]

Some info:

The solid-state disk , a storage device based on DRAM chips for data storage that saw its market come and go, is now coming back again. The first SSD was delivered to the MVS mainframe market in 1978 by StorageTek and sold for $8,800 per megabyte-much cheaper than add-on memory-and had a maximum capacity of 90MB. The SSD served the mainframe industry as a virtual memory extension for paging and swapping programs in and out of memory. The arrival of expanded storage, a bus extension for additional main memory capacity, signaled the end of the SSD market--for a while.

In the early 1990s, a few small companies were building SSD's for select applications running on Unix, but market visibility was low and price per megabyte was still high. During the 1990s, Unix, NT, the Internet, and, later, Linux popularity increased, becoming the largest storage markets for data-bases, and the heavy I/O loads they generated created response-time bottlenecks. Twenty-five years after their first appearance, SSD's are still a niche market but are becoming the new stealth weapon for system programmers and storage administrators who struggle to deliver consistent response times necessary to meet service levels.

Based on high-density DRAM chips, rather than rotating disk media and moving heads, the variable and lengthy seek and rotational times for rotating disks are eliminated, leaving, only a very short access and data transfer time to complete an I/O operation. There are no cache misses or back-end data transfers on an SSD. Typical I/O operations on an SSD occur between 30 and 40 times faster than on a rotating disk. An SSD is a quick fix for severe I/O performance problems and doesn't face the ongoing access-density challenges of higher-capacity disks. These devices are fault-tolerant architectures and protect data from all types of device failures, not just from the loss of electrical power.

The high price per megabyte for SSDs had historically been the single-biggest challenge in justification. Today, the prices for SSDs are below $10 per megabyte, and the fault-tolerant capacities reach 50 gigabytes. SSDs are now creating a new market and have found new life, with the primary use being a database accelerator (Oracle, DB2, SQL, Informix, and Sybase), as databases are typically the most I/O-intensive of all applications.

[darmstadt]

You could always email him and ask why Oracle don't consider SSDs reliable enough for running the database on (although they will run a supplemental SGA on one to boost performance).

Maybe I will as at the time we were also running Oracle for MVS using these disks. Then again he's probably only conversant in Intel systems and has no knowledge of other hardware.

[TheFaQQer]

Is he talking out of his bottom? I was using SSDs on IBM mainframes back in the 80's and 90's so surely if they were good enough for mission critical corporate data then, then they should surely have improved by now?

You could always email him and ask why Oracle don't consider SSDs reliable enough for running the database on (although they will run a supplemental SGA on one to boost performance).

[darmstadt]

One of the interesting things that Tom Kyte was talking about at the UKOUG on Monday was that SSD wasn't yet as reliable to use as a main data store - it's OK for something that you don't mind losing, but not for anything mission critical.

Is he talking out of his bottom? I was using SSDs on IBM mainframes back in the 80's and 90's so surely if they were good enough for mission critical corporate data then, then they should surely have improved by now?

[Spacecadet]

That's what I use my laptop for too to be honest. But my point was that unless you're copying around large video files or running a huge database (neither of which you'd do on an SSD because they aren't really large enough), read and write speeds are less important than random access, which ought to be a lot better.

But I don't have one. Hopefully by the time I replace this laptop the prices will have become more sensible and an SSD will be standard equipment. It's all still at that early adopter phase.

About 70gb is the biggest I've had running on the laptop
That was a rarity though!

[VectraMan]

not bothered about weight or power use, my laptop was purchased as a portable desktop replacement.

That's what I use my laptop for too to be honest. But my point was that unless you're copying around large video files or running a huge database (neither of which you'd do on an SSD because they aren't really large enough), read and write speeds are less important than random access, which ought to be a lot better.

But I don't have one. Hopefully by the time I replace this laptop the prices will have become more sensible and an SSD will be standard equipment. It's all still at that early adopter phase.

[d000hg]

One of the interesting things that Tom Kyte was talking about at the UKOUG on Monday was that SSD wasn't yet as reliable to use as a main data store - it's OK for something that you don't mind losing, but not for anything mission critical.

I've been hearing the complete opposite!
Still, a sensible backup policy removes the dependance on hard drive reliability

Exactly. You shouldn't entrust data worth substantial time/money to any single storage device.

[stingman123]

Thinking of getting one for my desktop box, prices still al little steeop though, spotted a 128Gb drive for £299, decent write speeds as well.....

[Spacecadet]

One of the interesting things that Tom Kyte was talking about at the UKOUG on Monday was that SSD wasn't yet as reliable to use as a main data store - it's OK for something that you don't mind losing, but not for anything mission critical.

I've been hearing the complete opposite!
Still, a sensible backup policy removes the dependance on hard drive reliability

[TheFaQQer]

One of the interesting things that Tom Kyte was talking about at the UKOUG on Monday was that SSD wasn't yet as reliable to use as a main data store - it's OK for something that you don't mind losing, but not for anything mission critical.

[Spacecadet]

Why do you really care about read and write speeds on a laptop/netbook anyway? Surely the benefit is in random access, and in being lighter and using less power.

not bothered about weight or power use, my laptop was purchased as a portable desktop replacement.

[DiscoStu]

How long ago was that? No offence but I don't teally think netbooks use anything that would cost a decent amount. What netbook was it?
I'm only asking because they seem to have progressed a bit and the read speeds seem to be going up, especially within a Win7 environment.

It was a cheap & nasty Acer Aspire One. It's spent more time in bits than it has assembled. Next time I'll buy something decent!