The $99 dollar SSD has arrived

[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.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

*EDIT* Pics up now. http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/tweakit/index.html

*EDIT2* New benchmarks. http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7988

I just got this thing up and running, and I'm very excited. I'll try to be as thorough as possible, so expect a long read. This won't read like a standard review, but more of observations I've come across, as well as the benefits I've got for my own personal reasons.

Sandisk Extreme 4
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Cata...pactFlash.aspx

Yes, that's right. Compact flash. I'm not sure if most people realize, but compact flash cards are native ATA/IDE devices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_flash

I got my CF/IDE adapter here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822998002

And the card itself here:
http://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.proc...AD+SDCFX440969

Now, the Sandisk Extreme 4 card is a special CF card in one particular reason. This card supports ATA/66 natively, with expected transfers of 40MB/s. That's fast. Lexar also has a UDMA enabled card; the only two I'm aware of on the market currently. (compact flash 3.0 spec)

I'm currently running SuSE 10.2, and the first thing that's immediately noticable is the massive increase in boot speed. My boot speed was well over 2 minutes on a hard drive, that includes auto login of user to KDE. Using this compact flash drive it's around 50 seconds.(neither time includes BIOS times, this is from bootloader to usable desktop)

Other things I've noticed is YAST performance.(for those who are familiar with SuSE) It opens up within 2-3 or so seconds, on the hard drive it was around 8-10. Other applications also are notably faster.

I've also noticed an increase in web browsing speed. I don't have a particularly high speed connection to the net, it's 768k down, 128k up. But just browsing through webpages has also become faster.

I'm thinking that the hard drive was actually bottlenecking web browsing, as surprising as that is or not. But it makes sense, most webpages are made up by hundreds of tiny little files, the millisecond access times of a hard drive just can't keep up. I'd love to try web browsing on this thing with a 10MB connection, I'd bet it'd be instant as if the page were actually on my computer. But right now, it's pretty close. Most pages come up very similarly to the google page. Even pages that have a fairly high amount of content such as apple or redhat.com are noticably faster.

If you clicked the link, you've already become aware that my drive is 4GB in size. But I run linux, so who the heck cares? I've still got about 2GB of usable space after OS install, and I have a spare hard drive that's for etc data only.(be it music, games, or anything else) There's also an 8GB version of this card, and I expect larger sizes in the future.

For any windows users who may come across this, I have bad news for you, I don't think this will work for you. I couldn't even boot windows with this thing hooked up to my IDE port. I'd like to know how a Mac would handle this, but I personally find both win/mac to be extremely bossy...... So I doubt that the mac would handle it any differently.

But how about the BSDs? Solaris? And any other OS out there? I'd like to see some people try this and post their results if any wish to try this out.

I bought this mainly for performance reasons, but I also like how it does not generate any heat at all. And it uses next to no power. It's also noiseless.

This would be especially useful for you linux/laptop users. And I have seen CF/IDE adapters which are aimed at the laptop space which have two CF ports on it. Which means two drives for you, possibly adequate space for average day to day usage as you fly around the country.

Now, in order to get this working properly, I had to pass a kernel option at bootloader time, otherwise it wouldn't completely boot. That being "IDE=NODMA".

I have no clue why I had to do this, but I imagine that because this isn't a traditional drive, Sandisk had to make their DMA controller somewhat different. Hopefully someone will get in touch with them and update some drivers accordingly. I think there's still some potential left in this thing for more performance, more room to grow. I've also had a chance to play with an Extreme 3 card on suse 10.2, and the boot speed difference is about 5 seconds. The thing to consider here is that most motherboards do not support PIO modes 5 and 6, which is how Sandisk got 20MB/s out of the EX3 cards. So going from the EX3 to the EX4 card I didn't see a huge difference. I know for certain that my own motherboard doesn't support PIO 5 and 6, my bios tells me so. So I was limited to 10MB/s transfers, and still only got a 5 second increase. Like I said, I think there's room to grow here.

So any questions, comments on this? I know there's *ALOT* of people who have been looking forward to SSDs in their computers that are not dynamic. I've looked at rocketdrives and qikdrives, but using DRAM doesn't work well if there's a power outtage and you lose all your data.

Behold....... the power of linux. :-)

*EDIT* For those wondering, here are my main system specs.

Duron 1ghz, FSB O/C'd to 333
512MB Geil PC 433
ATi FireGL 8800
Abit NF7-S
Lian Li PC 70(yes, full tower)
And my flash drive. :-D

And please don't ask why I still run a Duron. I had a personal matter that demanded my barton. I'll be getting another one from Ebay shortly.