14 May, 2008

Solid State Hard drives have poor random write performance

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (1) 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/