The $99 dollar SSD has arrived

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Aaahh... The fun of benchmarking things.

What precisely are you measuring when you set up a metric?

Nothing really, specifically. I'm just replying back to a request from another poster. The only thing it really serves to me personally is to show that something isn't quite correct. I have a feeling that it's driver related, I don't see what else it could be.

Michael's got a fun job of trying to come up with things that actually have meaning when he does his performance comparisons (Which, by the way, keep doing the great work you have been doing in that space... ).

Agreed. I'd like to see a professional Phoronix review on this at some point in the future. I emailed Sandisk about this, not sure what kind of reply I'll get though. But I'm sure that an email from a review site with information requests will carry a little more weight than just some guy who does so. But we'll see. I'll post their reply when it comes through.

In the case of disk performance, data throughput speed IS important, but it's only a piece of the puzzle.

Agreed. I knew going into all of this that access times were going to be a net benefit, but it wasn't until I saw the transfer rate numbers that I realized just how much of a difference that access times truely mean.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Can you post the result of the following command?

/sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hdc

Yes Sir.

# /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:

Model=SanDisk SDCFX-4096, FwRev=HDX 4.04, SerialNo=012222C1207Q0359
Config={ HardSect NotMFM Removeable DTR>10Mbs nonMagnetic }
RawCHS=7964/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=576, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=DualPort, BuffSize=1kB, MaxMultSect=4, MultSect=4
CurCHS=7964/16/63, CurSects=8027712, LBA=yes, LBAsects=8027712
IORDY=no, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 *udma4 udma3 *udma4
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=disabled
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-4

* signifies the current active mode

[Svartalf]

Aaahh... The fun of benchmarking things.

What precisely are you measuring when you set up a metric? Michael's got a fun job of trying to come up with things that actually have meaning when he does his performance comparisons (Which, by the way, keep doing the great work you have been doing in that space... ).

In the case of disk performance, data throughput speed IS important, but it's only a piece of the puzzle.

What good is it if your disk has a transfer rate of 133 megabytes per second, if your disk is only capable of handing it to the cache at 20 megabytes per second? If it's in cache it'll hand it to the bus in question at the signalling rate; if not, it'll be delayed by the seek and rotation latency of the disk and then transferred to the cache and then to the bus- milliseconds later.

With a flash disk, there's only microseconds worth of latency ever. For large streaming files, it's a little better to have the high throughput because you're not paying as much for the seek latencies unless the disk is badly fragmented up. For a bunch of smallish files or a lot of random lookups, the flash disk may win over any normal disk you can lay your hands on- because of latencies.

[glussier]

Can you post the result of the following command?

/sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hdc

[halfmanhalfamazing]

What's the read results with it? (hdparm -t /dev/sda a few times)

Hmmm............

Well, something is definately amiss here. I doubt people are going to believe me when I say that everything just feels faster after upgrading once I post these numbers.

(none):~ # hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.18 seconds = 6.29 MB/sec
(none):~ # hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.25 seconds = 6.16 MB/sec
(none):~ # hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.18 seconds = 6.28 MB/sec

I'm wondering what the issue is here.

Even with these relatively low numbers, access times make a huge difference. Milliseconds vs nanoseconds.

[Michael]

What's the read results with it? (hdparm -t /dev/sda a few times)

Also, just to point out, there are a few motherboards on the market that also have a Compact Flash slot built into the motherboard; Tyan has a couple micro/flex ATX solutions.