What we learned about SSDs in 2015

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by tw04 on Sunday December 20, 2015 @01:38PM (#10767795)

How exactly does connecting to the PCIe bus obviate the need for RAID? RAID isn't about connecting drives, it's about not losing data. If you don't need RAID for your application today, you can purchase a non-RAID SAS adapter for a couple hundred bucks, or just use the onboard ports that are sure to be there.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by tehwalrus on Sunday December 20, 2015 @01:55PM (#10767867)

> RAID isn't about connecting drives, it's about not losing data.

RAID-0 is used as a way to get faster performance from spinning disk drives, as you can return parts of each read request from different (striped) drives.

You also get better write performance, as your writes are split across the drives.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by lsc on Sunday December 20, 2015 @02:19PM (#10767945)

uh, this shouldn't be voted down. Now, I don't use RAID for performance, I use raid for reliability, like parent said, and I've never actually been in a position where it would make sense, but people do use raid0 to increase performance. It happens, even if it's not nearly as common as using raid to prevent data loss.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by toomuchtodo on Sunday December 20, 2015 @03:19PM (#10768157)

Back in the day, folks would RAID0 AWS EBS volumes to get the level of performance they needed (this was long before SSD EBS volumes).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by bigiain on Sunday December 20, 2015 @05:44PM (#10768611)

Now you're making me feel old - when "back in the day" and "AWS" get used in the same sentence... :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by MichaelGG on Sunday December 20, 2015 @03:43PM (#10768232)

This is still (AFAIK) the recommended way to get higher IOPS out of Azure SSDs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by mirimir on Sunday December 20, 2015 @06:06PM (#10768683)

I like RAID10. It's almost as reliable as RAID1, and you get about half the capacity and performance boost of RAID0. With four drives, RAID10 gives you the same capacity as RAID6. It's only ~30% slower, and it rebuilds much faster after drive failure and replacement. With more drives, you get 100% of added drive capacity for RAID6 vs 50% for RAID10, but rebuild time gets crazy huge.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by burntwater on Sunday December 20, 2015 @04:16PM (#10768327)

High-end video servers used in the entertainment industry typically use RAID 0. My last project, for example, used 10 250GB SSDs in RAID 0.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by ersii on Sunday December 20, 2015 @05:37PM (#10768586)

What kind of video servers are you talking about? For ingesting from a feed/camera in? Streaming out video? Curious.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by burntwater on Sunday December 20, 2015 @11:34PM (#10769594)

While these servers can ingest video feeds, they wouldn't (typically) be saving the incoming feeds. These servers play out video over many projectors blended into a single seamless image. If you've watched the past few Olympics opening ceremonies, you most certainly saw the projections.

My recent project, which was relatively small, played back a single video over 4 blended projectors. Each video frame was a 50MB uncompressed TGA file, 30 times a second. On a more complex show, you could be trying to play back multiple video streams simultaneously.

D3 - http://www.d3technologies.com/ and Pandora - http://www.coolux.de/products/pandoras-box-server/

are two of the big players in the industry.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by pjc50 on Monday December 21, 2015 @05:53AM (#10770540)

Each video frame was a 50MB uncompressed TGA file, 30 times a second.

Ouch! Not even a PNG?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by burntwater on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @03:48PM (#10780306)

Uncompressed TGA is used for two reasons: Quality (this particular image was going on a screen three stories tall) and, as the other commenter mentioned, the time required to decompress images.

I'm not an expert on the exact architecture, but I'm guessing that with uncompressed TGA you just throw the bits at the GPU and they get displayed, while if you have to uncompress images that first gets handled by the CPU (?).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by tracker1 on Monday December 21, 2015 @12:59PM (#10772347)

I'd guess the time to do compression from TGA to PNG may be more than 1/30th of a second. Or at least reliably/consistently so.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by bigiain on Sunday December 20, 2015 @07:18PM (#10768897)

A friend of mine does a lot of programming and installations using Dataton Watchout - where they use 4 or more 4K projectors stitched together into one big image. He's regularly got war stories about problems with the latest batch of SSDs not playing well in RAID0 causing stutters on simultaneous playback of multiple 4K video streams.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by im2w1l on Monday December 21, 2015 @03:29AM (#10770183)

Is there an advantage compared to putting each stream on a different drive?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by burntwater on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @03:49PM (#10780312)

It's possible, and probably advantageous to a point. Eventually you'll hit bottlenecks somewhere, at which point you throw more servers at it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by otakucode on Monday December 21, 2015 @03:27AM (#10770179)

Sure. My first purchase of SSDs were 3 80GB Intel SSDs which I put into RAID-0 and used for my primary system drive on my gaming machine. RAID-0 provides very-near 100% performance boost per drive added. Of course, it also provides the same bonuses to the likelihood of total data loss... but that was a risk I was OK with taking (and which never bit me!).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by tracker1 on Monday December 21, 2015 @01:01PM (#10772359)

Mine was the same drive, my first SSD was the first 80GB Intel one, and just over a year of use, it started reporting itself as an 8MB drive. You never know for sure what will remain good, or be good consistently.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by dajonker on Sunday December 20, 2015 @02:21PM (#10767952)

RAID 0 does not have any level of redundancy, so you might as well remove the 'R' in RAID and replace it by 'S' for striping or something. However, people would probably get confused if you start calling it SAID.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by bigiain on Sunday December 20, 2015 @07:23PM (#10768910)

Complaining about industry-standard terminology like this is mostly a waste of time.

The sort of people who need to know that but don't aren't going to learn it from a post on HN, and the sort of people who'll read it on HN mostly don't need to be told.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by mirimir on Sunday December 20, 2015 @11:05PM (#10769519)

Sad but true. I gather that RAID0 has been the default for notebooks with two drives. And for the first 1TB MyBooks.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by tracker1 on Monday December 21, 2015 @01:02PM (#10772368)

0 == no redundancy...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What we learned about SSDs in 2015 by fulafel on Monday December 21, 2015 @05:17AM (#10770427)

> RAID [...] it's about not losing data

It's a pretty ineffective way to guard against data loss, you need backups.

RAID [1-6] is an availability solution, saving the downtime of restoring from backup in the case of the most predictable disk failures. It doesn't help with all the other cases of data loss.

[ Parent | on HN ]