A few years ago The SSD Guy posted an analogy that Intel’s Jim Pappas uses to illustrate the latency differences between DRAM, an SSD, and an HDD. If we look at DRAM latency to be a single heartbeat, then what happens when we scale that timing up to represent SSDs and HDDs? How many heartbeats would it take to access either one, and what could you do in that time?
I still think it’s a pretty interesting way to make all these latency differences easier to understand.
Just recently I learned of a Rich Report video of a 2015 presentation in which Micron’s Ryan Baxter uses a different and equally interesting analogy based on tomatoes.
Tomatoes aren’t the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about SSDs, but this video may change my way of thinking!
The tomato slide, 9:30 into the presentation, is Continue reading “Comparing SSDs to Tomatoes”
