14 May, 2008

Solid State Hard drives have poor random write performance

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (4) Comments

I just learned the hard way as to how *poor* the *poor random write performance* of Solid State Drives actually means. I recently bought a new Dell Latitude D430 and the laptop keeps freezing every now and then for a few seconds. It is fairly irritating and a quick look at my performance monitor shows ample available RAM and the CPU utilization is next to nothing. I figured the only possibility was some sort of I/O blocking.

Having spent a considerable amount of time on building large scale storage infrastructure, I am well aware of the limitations of solid state hard drives when it comes to random writes in large files. However I am facing a first-hand experience of actually witnessing the poor performance.

A quick google serach revealed that I am not the only one facing this issue -

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000927.html

Excerpt: I recently bought a dell d430 with an SSD and it was useless, reason: Poor random write performance. The user in question had a multi-GB outlook mailbox and the machine would constantly freeze for 5-50 seconds while the HD was doing IO blocking as it shifted blocks around. Had to replace with a standard technology 1.8″ drive now all is well. $500 out the window.

Other Links:

http://www.destinationip.com/index.php/C6/
http://office-outlook.com/outlook-forum/index.php?t=msg&th=75897/

5 May, 2008

The Paradox of choice

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (2) Comments

I just saw a profound video (a TED Talk) by Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice. Barry is an author of a book by the same name. The video is short and covers basic logical reasoning on how more choice can actually be detrimental to our welfare. His arguments are mostly compelling (with a few areas I may not necessarily agree with). The macro fundamentals however are something I can relate to.

As a part of running Directi, I have learnt this paradox the hard way. While there exist several anecdotes, one that comes to mind is ResellerClub’s (one of our many businesses) our strategy of selling hosting packages. I remember not too long ago, when Rclub used to offer a complicated configurator for purchasing hosting packages. While other companies had a set of fixed packages, we offered our customers the ability to choose each parameter on their own. One could select the exact amount of disk space, email accounts, bandwidth, number of databases, database space and so on. If memory serves me right each parameter had between 2 to 15 combinations totalling up to possibly well over half a million combinations.

RClub has since sacrificed that system in favor of a simpler set of 4 packages, but not until we went through some of the thought process expounded by Barry in his talk.In summary, excessive choice can -

• Overwhelm a consumer
• Confuse a consumer – especially in a scenario where the customer does not know all the variables
• cause Paralysis – inability to decide which way to go
• result in Procrastination – where one chooses to postponing the choice due to their inability to make one
• manifest Regret – should I have picked the other one?

13 Oct, 2007

And so it all began …

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (4) Comments

I am a prolific writer.

Actually – scratch that statement. At best it sounds immodest, at worst it is untrue in comparison with the existing active participants of the blogosphere. I do write a lot. I also admit I want to write more than I usually do. A lot of the content I create is for internal corporate training purposes at Directi. To me that is an investment well-made. The value of my time spent in penning down something, will likely be derived by several hundred individuals over the years. I consider the value of any creation, directly proportional to the number of people that can use it. That is probably over-simplifying it, but it is definitely one of the more important variables.

We use Confluence internally, as our knowledge management system, individual blogs, news feed, the Directi University (our internal training corpus) et al. Many a times I find myself penning down articles which I believe deserve greater visibility than the confines of our Intranet – not just for the sake of self-propaganda (and every blogger knows the importance of that) but also for the sake of eliciting greater participation in the ensuing debate.

Enter the blog. Maybe not my daily journal. Maybe not a repository for regular thoughts. Hopefully a collection of articles that will be read, by a larger circle. At the least an attempt.