April 2015 – The SSD Guy Blog

I have to admit that it’s embarrassing when The SSD Guy misses something important in the world of flash storage, but I only recently learned of a paper that Baidu, China’s leading search engine, presented at the ASPLOS conference a year ago. The paper details how Baidu changed the way they use flash to gain significant benefits over their original SSD-based systems.

After having deployed 300,000 standard SSDs over the preceding seven years, Baidu engineers looked for ways to achieve higher performance and more efficient use of the flash they were buying. Their approach was to strip the SSD of all functions that could be better performed by the host server, and to reconfigure the application software and operating system to make the best of flash’s idiosyncrasies.

You can only do this if you have control of both the system hardware and software.

The result was SDF, or “Software-Defined Flash”, a card that Continue reading “Baidu Goes Beyond SSDs”

A friend who trades in commodities has been having a difficult time lately. He placed a sizeable bet on coffee futures back in 2011, only to see prices slide from a $314 peak to today’s $151 prices.

So why would this appear in the pages of The SSD Guy blog?

In a nutshell, coffee demand is falling thanks to increased use of SSDs. It’s not that people were giving their computers coffee to speed them up, nor were managers ladling coffee into their employees to get more out of them when the real problem was slow PC performance. Instead it’s about boot-up time.

For the past few decades the average worker comes into the office, turns on the PC, then goes to the coffee room to get the morning’s first cup of brew while the PC slowly finds its way to full operation. While in the coffee room that worker may encounter workmates, and delve into a heady conversation about last night’s TV programs, or a sporting event, or even politics. This might turn that one-cup coffee-room visit into a 2-cup session.

Now that savvy bosses are Continue reading “The Impact of SSDs on Coffee Prices”