The Horn of Plenty

SSD news has flooded in the last couple of days. Head over to AnandTech for Intel's latest, as well as LSI (a fairly new player and new home of SandForce silicon) and OCZ.

Of most interest is the OCZ Vertex 4, built with in-house Indilinx silicon. Prosumer/consumer gear begins to approach enterprise performance; then again, OCZ continues to tout their invasion of the Enterprise Space. One aspect I noticed in the Vertex 4 piece, is that they're reporting random I/O in MBs rather than IOPS. Therefore, one can see that total bytes moved isn't hugely different twixt sequential and random, for the Indilinx silicon. I do wonder how soon it will be that the two components of SSD performance, NAND size and controller sophistication, will collide? At some point, the unreliability of decreasing feature size in the NAND will demand so many cycles in the controller that SSD performance will level out. And, perhaps, decline. Not yet, though.

The Vertex 4 doesn't sound ready for Prime Time Enterprise (no superCap), but for development machines building RDBMS applications using full fledged enterprise SSD, boy howdy is this yummy. (Perversely, OCZ share price is doing a swan dive!) Less and less reason to ignore Dr. Codd.