Jacob Yocom-Piatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > David Gwynne wrote: > > some ssd drives would be very cool to try. id love to play with these: > > http://www.stec-inc.com/product/zeusiops.php > > am i right in saying these STEC drives are 10K USD each? yikes
Yes, the high-end STec drives (and various competing manufacturers, for example BitMicro and Texas Memory Systems) are extremely fast. These drives can sustain 100-200 MByte/s of reads or writes (!), have IO rates in excess of 50K IOps for "small" IOs (like 1K or 4K). The real beauty is that random IO and sequential IO do indeed run at the same speed - there are no seeks. In spite of their high write rates, they do have good write endurance measured in years if writing continuously). And they do cost 5- or 6-digit amounts. You get what you pay for. As they are completely normal drives (typically with fibre channel or SAS interfaces), I'm sure they would work excellently with OpenBSD. But they are not really suitable for your average laptop - beginning with the cost question, plus a laptop usually doesn't have the CPU and IO system horsepower to make sensible use of such a drive. I have been very sorely tempted to borrow the STec drives from my lab at work, and set up a typical desktop workstation machine with them (would need to find a fibre channel controller too). It would run like a bat out of hell. But at a 5-digit price, that's to be expected. Note that STec also manufactures other drives, which have lower capabilities, and a price point that is much more sensible for laptop or household applications. -- Ralph Becker-Szendy [EMAIL PROTECTED] 408-395-1435 735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033
