14 April 2010

PostgreSQL and SSD

I visit the PostgreSQL site pretty often, and yesterday there was a link to a post on Bruce Momjian's blog (he's a Big Wig in the PostgreSQL world) about SSD. I was moved to comment, and then today saw that AnandTech has just published a review of a new SSD. Herewith my next comment, as it's relevant to this endeavor and I'll assume that y'all don't visit Bruce as a matter of course.


Just for grins, and because it's timely (published today), here's the latest AnandTech SSD review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3656/corsairs-force-ssd-reviewed-sf1200-is-very-good .

What's important about this review:
- it's for a SandForce 1200 controller, which is intended to be SF's vanilla retail controller
- it's really fast
- it uses no external DRAM cache, which is material to design decisions about how to build an SSD, which makes SF based SSD materially different from all others, retail or "enterprise"
- one can see the playing field of most retail SSD and top notch retail HDD in the tables

SSD are not yet commodity parts, unlike HDD. Evolution continues; hopefully so will decisions about how best to utilize them in RDBMS.

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