18 September 2009

I Can do a Full Gainer

I'm going to bite the bullet, so to speak, and get an SSD for this machine and do some personal experimenting. I've been putting it off for a while due to: the time devoted to getting work (which is way too time consuming), the time needed to be a stock tycoon, and my less than stellar view of what's been available. What I want is a device that's under a grand, has enough capacity to simulate a real-world (commercial) system, and is a no brainer to install on ubuntu. I've long since lost interest in doing hardware installs just for laughs.

I think I've found what I want. It's the Fusion-io ioXtreme. It was reported to be shipping in July, but looking at the Fusion-io site, they're in sign up to be the first on your block to own one mode. Sigh. But the price, $895 for 80gig in a PCIe card, is in the proper ballpark, and it won't be rattling around in the machine. More than the X-25M, about the same as the X-25E, $$/gig anyway.

While I was wandering around the Fusion-io site, I came across this from July. Now, it doesn't read as though they went ahead and normalized the data, just moved it to the SSD. (It's a TPC-H database and likely some form of star/snowflake.) I can live with that; folks are still taking baby steps along the Yellow Brick Road. It does demonstrate, if one accepts the notion of validity of TPC benchmarks, that SSD can save money while being faster and less filling.

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