SSD guru needed. Looking for an SSD with good Garbage Collection.

[Serveo]

Without trim, expect 15-20 MB/s write speed per drive (as well as significantly degraded read speeds, down to 20-30 MB/s per drive). All Crucial M500/M550/MX100 and Samsung Evos are like that.

It has TRIM

 

[KuJoe]

It has TRIM

Isn't TRIM an OS/kernel function?

 

[Serveo]

Isn't TRIM an OS/kernel function?

True, let me rephrase that. It has its own garbage collection function called "Active garbage collection". More related to this: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/tkb/articleprintpage/tkb-id/ssd@tkb/article-id/48

 

[KuJoe]

Looks like Crucial just jumped to the top of my list.

EDIT: Dang, out of my price range.

 

[Serveo]

256GB - €89,-. Thats even the level of a WD Black spindle. How much do you want to pay? (-;

 

[KuJoe]

Under $100 USD each. This is for a personal server that I only plan to use for testing, development, a Windows jump box, and a few private game servers for me and 6 close friends so the less I can spend on it the better.

 

[Coastercraze]

Maybe have a look at Mushkin?

 

[KuJoe]

Maybe have a look at Mushkin?

How is there BGC? I didn't see anything that stood out in regards to it.

 

[Deleted]

I'd avoid hybrid drives, since your controller is a rebranded LSI model. It seems to support CacheCade. Instead of 10K SAS, I'd look for some WD Black drives on sale. They do well in RAID, benchmark well, and have been very reliable. If you go the CacheCade route, you can also selectively place things onto your SSD, while leaving IO-intensive/write-heavy apps on the hard disk.

I would avoid using SATA drives in a RAID environment for these reasons:

- If I remember correctly, SATA drives only have 1 outstanding write transaction at a time, SAS drives have as many as your Tagged Command Queue Depth (usually 128 or 256 depending on the drive). NCQ is not the same thing as TCQ, and TCQ is still superior for perpendicular drives.

- SATA drives can't write and read at the same time on the same transaction

- SAS drives have 2 dedicated ASIC's on the drive I/O card, one to handle I/O, Tagged Command Queuing/reordering, and another that deals head tracking. (which is important under load)

- SATA drives are affected by I/O vibration degradation, ie: more drives, more vibration which can kill your throughput (please see this excellent Sun Article that describes this behavior: http://web.archive.org/web/20090831133200/http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency (look at the comments as well). SAS drives have a dedicated processor that mitigates this more than plain SATA drives.