Found on Slashdot: Wear Leveling, RAID Can Wipe Out SSD Advantage

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recently saw this on Slashdot ... and since IBM i supports both RAID and SSD's, I thought it might be interesting ...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/03/06/1650232/Wear-Leveling-RAID-Can-Wipe-Out-SSD-Advantage

This article discusses using solid state disks in enterprise storage networks. A couple of problems noted by the author: wear leveling can eat up most of a drive's bandwidth and make write performance no faster than a hard drive, and using SSDs with RAID controllers brings up its own set of problems. 'Even the highest-performance RAID controllers today cannot support the IOPS of just three of the fastest SSDs. I am not talking about a disk tray; I am talking about the whole RAID controller. If you want full performance of expensive SSDs, you need to take your $50,000 or $100,000 RAID controller and not overpopulate it with too many drives. In fact, most vendors today have between 16 and 60 drives in a disk tray and you cannot even populate a whole tray. Add to this that some RAID vendor's disk trays are only designed for the performance of disk drives and you might find that you need a disk tray per SSD drive at a huge cost.'