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The end of the hard disk
xtabber:
Around 1000USD a pop you have now decently sized hard disks that work according to SSD principles, but instead of using SATA, they use the PCI-Express lanes of your motherboard. If you think SSD's (or SSD's in RAID) are fast...these puppies run 4 to 5 times faster than SSD drives (at their top speed) in most usage scenarios. If you want really fast servers that have no problems shifting mountains of data around, SSD's are already old hat.
-Shades (June 23, 2015, 11:09 PM)
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Sorry to disillusion you, but the devices you are talking about are SSDs, not hard disks. The difference is that the flash memory and controller are mounted directly to a PCIe card rather than enclosed in a SATA case to allow swapping with HDDs.
Actual hard disks are limited to a 6GB/s transfer rate because that is the fastest you can pull data off of a rotating memory device. That is why the SATA-III interface tops out at 6GB/s. Flash memory does not have the same limitations and by mounting it directly on a PCIe card, you avoid the bottleneck of the SATA interface.
Deozaan:
Simple search brings up several links....
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=SSD+use+the+PCI-Express+lanes-wraith808 (June 24, 2015, 09:41 AM)
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I knew about PCI-e mounted SSDs, but Shades said "hard disks" which was something (PCI-e mounted HDDs faster than SSDs) that I hadn't heard about. But it seems xtabber has clarified that issue already.
Shades:
Next time I will be more precise and call it "storage device"...that should make everyone happy. :)
wraith808:
Next time I will be more precise and call it "storage device"...that should make everyone happy. :)
-Shades (June 24, 2015, 08:30 PM)
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I got what you were saying, and that you weren't saying hard disk in the terms of a spinning platter. Which is why I phrased my search in such a way. :)
Deozaan:
Next time I will be more precise and call it "storage device"...that should make everyone happy. :)
-Shades (June 24, 2015, 08:30 PM)
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I was further confused by the "SSDs are already old hat" because the PCI-e mounted SSDs are SSDs. That, combined with "hard disks that work according to SSD principles" made me think this was some new technology I hadn't heard about before.
I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just trying to explain why what you said confused me. :)
It's all good though. The miscommunication has been cleared up.
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