Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Fri, 1 Jan 2010, Al Hopper wrote:
Interesting article - rumor has it that this is the same controller
that Seagate will use in its upcoming enterprise level SSDs:
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3702
It reads like SandForce has implemented a bunch of ZFS like
functionality in firmware. Hmm, I wonder if they used any ZFS source
code??
The article (and product) seem interesting, but (in usual form) the
article is written as a sort of unsubstantiated guess-work propped up
by vendor charts and graphs and with links so the gentle reader can
purchase the product on-line.
It is good to see that Intel is seeing some competition.
Bob
--
Yeah, there were a bunch more "maybe" and "looks like" and "might be"
than I'm really comfortable with in that article.
The one thing it does bring up is the old problem of Where Intelligence
Belongs. You most typically see this in the CPU/coprocessor cycle,
where the battle between enough performance gain in using a separate
chip vs the main CPU to perform some task is a never ending cycle.
One of ZFS's founding ideas is that Intelligence belongs up in the main
system (i.e. running in the OS, on the primary CPU(s)), and that all
devices are stupid and unreliable. I'm looking at all the (purported)
features in this SandForce controller, and wondering how they'll
interact with a "smart" filesystem like ZFS, rather than a traditional
"stupid" filesystem a la UFS. I see a lot of overlap, which I'm not
sure is a good thing.
Maybe it's approaching time for vendors to just produce really stupid
SSDs: that is, ones that just do wear-leveling, and expose their true
page-size info (e.g. for MLC, how many blocks of X size have to be
written at once) and that's about it. Let filesystem makers worry about
scheduling writes appropriately, doing redundancy, etc.
Oooh! Oooh! a whole cluster of USB thumb drives! Yeah! <wink>
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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