[geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state Solaris storage

[Shannon Hendrix]

Solid State Solaris Storage... heh...

Anyway:

I found some industrial USB flash drives.

They are ruggedized, have better algorithms supposedly focused on  
reliability, and higher quality flash memory.

Unfortunately, they are also 8GB or smaller right now, and quite  
expensive.

None of them said anything about if their USB interface was more  
reliable than normal.  Hopefully they are at least very careful to  
meet specs and not do stupid things.

Some other options I looked at:

--

Seagate CF hard drives: the sheer novelty of a quarter-sized hard  
drive to boot from is almost overwhelmingly tempting.  I couldn't find  
any real data on how reliable they were.  Neat though.

--

SATA SSDs: Wow, they are expensive.  However, small ones are fairly  
reasonable.  You can get a Super Talent 8GB SSD for $150 or so.

That's more than enough room for / and /usr for installing Solaris 10,  
which in my case would give me two drive bays free for ZFS RAID 1.

Expensive, but I'm really giving it a lot of thought.  The SSD units  
seem to offer a whole lot more writes per block than most other flash  
media.

--

CF and SATA adapters:  This seemed like a good idea, but nice ones  
that run about half the speed of SSD drives are almost as expensive as  
the SSD units.  The main advantage is that you can get bigger sizes,  
but they cost even more.

Still, this is an option.  If you are willing to put up with 10MB/sec  
average speed, you can cheap 8GB units that will hold Solaris, but  
they are *VERY* slow.

--

No solid state drives at all:

One option that you have to consider, is not using RAID at all.   
Install Solaris Nevada, and use the copies option in ZFS for single  
drive redundancy.

In my personal case, that would let me save a lot of money right now  
so I can slowly save for something nicer, like an external N-disk ZFS  
RAIDZ, or maybe even a decent hardware RAID with ZFS on top.

--

I'm not sure if I'll do anything soon or not, but the SSD option keeps  
getting cheaper, and is looking good.  Yes, the drives are very small,  
but you get 60MB/sec write, and 45MB sec read, and 8GB is more than  
enough for a Solaris install.

The other issue is that once you boot Solaris, you really don't hit / 
usr that much.

Everything that needs to be fast would be on ZFS.

Anyway, the market for SSD stuff is getting interesting.

Also on the horizon, at least I hope so very much, is magnetic memory  
which thus far looks like it will have a good fraction of RAM speeds,  
but the non-volatile nature of flash and SSD drives.  Of course, this  
seems to be having a hard time getting from the lab to the street so  
far.

But imagine 500MB/sec magnetic SSD...








-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com