Name: Anonymous 2007-06-01 18:50 ID:QcdfPD0h
Last year I designed and implemented a portable electronic device that included a Xilinx 4 FX60, mobile DDR, GigE, and an ATA-5 interface to a solid state drive. My company shelled out 15,000 dollars for this 32 GB solid State drive because the manufacturer promised a continuous data rate of 60 MB/sec. The way this portable device I designed worked is I would have data inputed into the board/device and my custom ATA-5 controller (that I wrote) would write the data as quickly as possible to "capture" it (and off topic... the ATA spec is a mess and probably one of the crappiest specs in the Industry. its a miracle that harddrives even work). Then later the user would take the device back to the lab and the embedded PPC405 processor would use the ATA controller to read teh data from the drive and send it out via gigabit Eithernet.
Long story short... the 15,000 dollar solid state drive we bought did not have a continuous state rate of 60 MB, but a "sustained" data rate of 60 MB/sec. This caused data loss in my system because I didn't have spare buffer memory. I went down the path of sampling many different drives (some solid state and some not) and the performance numbers of the drives were all relatively the same. The best performing drive happened to be a Hitachi, non solid state. Bottom line is that all solid state drives have the exact same controllers and all conform to the same poor standards. There is zero performance gains from solid state drives, and you can quote me on that.
Unrelated to hard drives, I have done extensive design work with Gigabit Eithernet... In a hardware implementation only, I can achieve very high data rates (920 mbps)... Yet when you add an OS and use drives that live in this OS (say montavista Linux or QNX) then the performance of that same gigabit connection is crippled down to 200 mbps or less. your typical OS TCP stack is a huge reason for this lack in performance.
In conclusion... if your gigabit eithernet connection is running at 200 mbps, then your 15 MB/sec data rate is not the bottle neck to your system. Any modern Harddrive can handle that data rate.
Long story short... the 15,000 dollar solid state drive we bought did not have a continuous state rate of 60 MB, but a "sustained" data rate of 60 MB/sec. This caused data loss in my system because I didn't have spare buffer memory. I went down the path of sampling many different drives (some solid state and some not) and the performance numbers of the drives were all relatively the same. The best performing drive happened to be a Hitachi, non solid state. Bottom line is that all solid state drives have the exact same controllers and all conform to the same poor standards. There is zero performance gains from solid state drives, and you can quote me on that.
Unrelated to hard drives, I have done extensive design work with Gigabit Eithernet... In a hardware implementation only, I can achieve very high data rates (920 mbps)... Yet when you add an OS and use drives that live in this OS (say montavista Linux or QNX) then the performance of that same gigabit connection is crippled down to 200 mbps or less. your typical OS TCP stack is a huge reason for this lack in performance.
In conclusion... if your gigabit eithernet connection is running at 200 mbps, then your 15 MB/sec data rate is not the bottle neck to your system. Any modern Harddrive can handle that data rate.