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A bit about SSD perfomance and Optane SSDs, when you're planning your next SSD....

Stilez

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Apr 8, 2016
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Stilez submitted a new resource:

A bit about SSD perfomance and Optane SSDs, when you're out buying your next SSDs.... - Did you know... watcxh for the bathtub!

NOTE:

I'll be referring in this page, to a type of SSD developed by Intel and Micron, called 3D X-Point (pronounced "crosspoint"). It's most widely sold as Intel's Optane. The Optane devices I mean are things like the 900p, 905p, and P48xx. First generation optane, and some smaller ones aren't much use.

To see why I pick that kind of SSD out for performance handling, you need to know something about SSD sustained, random, and mixed, IO. That's what this page is about. A lot of...

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Constantin

Vampire Pig
Joined
May 19, 2017
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1,828
I am enthusiastically preparing for 12.x... and special VDEVs. Currently, much fragmented, small data is being beaten down via compression into fewer, but larger files. Not only should rsync's execute faster (some of these system backups had over 500k of mostly small files in them), but more importantly by reducing the number of small files on the server, I can take advantage of small file special VDEVs more extensively / efficiently.

My last frontier is the iPhone backup share whose folders are littered with bazillions of small files. I'm likely going to opt for a sparesbundle disk image to hold them, which will reduce the speed at which stuff can be written to it (which is occasional) but the resulting bands should stay way above the small file threshold.

Once the server starts using those special VDEVs (one for metadata, the other for small files) I intend to re-purpose the existing L2ARC drive to be a generalist - no longer serving just metadata as it currently does. That in turn should really speed up certain often-used files like the iTunes database file, whose update pace can be glacial at times.

I continue to be dismayed how Apple does not take advantage of multi-core systems. For example, while you can create multiple parallel processes to dump data into compressed disk images at the command line, the GUI flagship for this (Disk Utility) will only do one disk image at a time and the GUI of that App is locked while it happens. Ditto iTunes - it is only allowed to rip one disk at a time per the GUI.
 
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