Category: SSD Testing

Failure is Not an Option — It’s a Requirement!

I was recently reminded of a presentation made by GoDaddy way back in the 2013 Flash Memory Summit in which I first heard the statement: “Failure is not an option — it is a requirement!”  That’s certainly something that got my attention!  It just sounded wrong.

In fact, this expression was used to describe a very pragmatic approach the company’s storage team had devised to determine the exact maximum load that could be supported by any piece of its storage system.

This is key, since, at the time, GoDaddy claimed to be the world’s largest web hosting service with 11 million users, 54 million domains registered, over 5 million hosting accounts, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee (although the internal goal was 99.999% – five nines!)

The presenters outlined four stages of how validation processes had Continue reading “Failure is Not an Option — It’s a Requirement!”

Comparing Samsung’s Planar and V-NAND SSDs

Samsung 3D V-NAND Press PhotoSamsung recently introduced  its 3D V-NAND-based 850 SSD which, according to The Tech Report, uses the same MEX controller as the company’s 3-bit planar SSD, the 840, introduced last year.

Samsung said in its keynote speech at the 2013 Flash Memory Summit that V-NAND consumes an average of 27% less power and runs at least 20% faster than its planar counterpart in an SSD application, all while providing ten times the endurance.  It’s only natural to assume that this would allow designers to produce a V-NAND SSD that would significantly outperform its planar NAND counterpart.

The SSD Guy had an opportunity to review Continue reading “Comparing Samsung’s Planar and V-NAND SSDs”

SPDEcon Sneak Peek

SPDEcon Solid State PreviewWe have just finished up a webcast (now available for replay) that gives a preview of five of the solid state storage presentations that will be given at the upcoming Storage Plumbing and Data Engineering Conference – SPDEcon for short – hosted by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) on June 10-12 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Santa Clara, California.

Our webcast, titled SPDEcon Solid State Preview, presents snippets of Continue reading “SPDEcon Sneak Peek”

Not all SSDs are Created Equal

Results of the SNIA PTS on Seventeen SSDs and one HDDSSDs vary widely in performance.  This is something that becomes amazingly clear when a number of these devices are put through a battery of tests.

Calypso Systems ran the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS), outlined in an earlier post in this blog, on seventeen SSDs and a single HDD.  The results appear, in miniature, in the graphic for this post. Continue reading “Not all SSDs are Created Equal”

What’s the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS)?

Click Here for the SNIA SSSI PTSThe Storage Networking Industry Association – SNIA – determined a few years back that it should address SSDs since they were about to become an important part of most storage systems.  To this end SNIA created the Solid State Storage Initiative, or SSSI.

They didn’t name it after SSDs since there will clearly come a time when flash stops pretending it’s an HDD and abandons standard HDD mechanical and interface specifications. Continue reading “What’s the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS)?”