1. The (Solid) State Of Drive Technology
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2. Who Am I?
Kendal Van Dyke
Senior DBA for Channel Intelligence in Celebration, FL
SQL Server DBA 8+ years

3. Agenda How SSDs Work & Fundamentals Performance Demo
How People Are Using SSDs Today
Caveats
Are SSDs Right For You?
Q & A

4. Solid State Drive (SSD)
How It Works
Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
Solid State Drive (SSD)
HDD
Magnetic Media
Spinning Platter(s)
Mechanical Heads move back and forth to read\write data
SSD
Electronic Media
NAND Flash
No moving parts
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5. SSD Fundamentals Single Level Cell (SLC) Multi Level Cell (MLC)
Wear Leveling
TRIM
Over-Provisioning
SLC
2 states per cell (1 bit)
Metaphor: Single Home
MLC
4 states per cell (2 bits)
Metaphor: Duplex
SLC vs. MLC
- Biggest issue is lifetime
- Write Cycles
SLC: 100,000
MLC: 3, ,000
Typical users write ~ 1.4 Gbytes/day
Heavy users write ~ 5.2 Gbytes/day
TRIM
Garbage collection
Windows 7 & Windows 2008 R2
Prior OS’s use custom implementations that require free RAM
SLC vs. MLC Storage
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6. Performance - Hardware
Fusion IO IO Drive
128 GB PCI Express
SLC
OCZ Z-Drive p84
256 GB PCI Express
MLC
Dell PowerVault MD1000
12x 146 GB 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah SAS
RAID 10

7. Performance - Metrics SQLIO File Sizes IOs/sec MB/sec Avg. Latency
Fusion IO: 64 GB
OCZ: 64 GB
PowerVault: 512 GB

8. Performance - Reads 8 KB random reads 64 KB offset 64 KB RAID Stripe
64 KB allocation unit
IO Depth: 8
Threads: 8

9. Performance - Writes 8 KB random writes 64 KB offset 64 KB RAID Stripe
64 KB allocation unit
IO Depth: 8
Threads: 8

10. Demo
128 GB OCZ Vertex II
2 year old laptop
Windows 7 x64
REBOOT!

11. How People Are Using SSDs
MySpace
Fusion IO
Banks
STEC in EMC
SMBs
OCZ & Fusion IO

12. Caveats Software RAID for PCI Express
Drives have been known to disappear
Fusion IO requires x64
$$$$ vs Traditional HDD
STEC Zeus 48 GB SATA SLC - $10,800

13. Are SSDs Right For You? It Depends! Good For: Not Recommended
Redundant systems
TempDB
Low Writes, High Reads
Not Recommended
Core systems
Five 9‘s systems

14. Questions?
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15. Additional Resources The Brave New World of SSDs (2 Parts)
The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs

16. THANK YOU!
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