I’ve bought a number of solid state drives and I’ve had to return most of them due to problems.  I’ve taken from that experience that a lot of the manufacturers don’t quite know what they are doing yet.  There are plenty of places on the internet you can read about the bugs in many of the released drives.  I’m hoping the acquisition of Indilinx by OCZ and SandForce by LSI will improve the reliability of drives based on those controllers.  However, my SSD purchases have been narrowing to Crucial who’s RealSSD C300 and M4 have been far more reliable than average and extremely well performing.  A recent review of the OCZ Octane drive shows the Crucial M4 as one of the better drives in server performance:

• http://techreport.com/articles.x/22078/8

I’m replacing a Patriot Torqx drive which failed and Patriot has given me the options of replacing it with a Torqx 2 or a Warp drive.

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These are some numbers for the cpu/mb/ram/video assuming all else will be equal.  The AMD Phenom II X4 945 is available again.  It’s a great CPU that allows for ECC RAM, if one is willing to spend 2x as much for ECC RAM these days.  Intel Sandy Bridge system will be much quicker, though I am considering waiting for Z68 motherboards to become available as that is only a month or so away.

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My phone is experiencing a lot of problems, most noticeably that call quality has been abysmal.  So I’m looking at new phones and perhaps a new carrier / plan.

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I speculated earlier that I might buy a sandy bridge CPU and motherboard and that it would represent a break from 16 years of buying AMD.  I have always bought at the low end of price where AMD has always offered superior competition.  But I am not blind to how well sandy bridge systems perform and I am looking for more performance from my next system.  I was strongly considering buying the i5-2500K and an H67 chipset motherboard.  But today I learned about yet another limitation to this configuration (above the 2500K not supporting VT-d and TXT, though I’m sure no TXT is actually a loss) and that is that you cannot overclock it.  So as usual Intel has a lineup which is complicated to make a choice because of all the various options in play.  I much prefer AMD’s simple setup: all features on every chip and you just pick the speed and cache.  Not to mention that I’d really prefer to buy ECC RAM which you can do on a consumer AMD motherboard but not on any consumer Intel board.

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My current PC is really giving me grief by being so slow.  I am in dire need of a faster system but probably won’t buy for another month or 2.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K
• Motherboard: something with an Intel H67 chipset
• Memory: 16GB DDR3
• Storage: OCZ Vertex 3 120GB (or maybe comparable SF-2200 SSD)
• Video: probably onboard
• Audio: probably onboard

This would be my first Intel desktop in… 16 years I think.  But I’m not optimistic that I can wait for Bulldozer.  I do have a couple of problems with the Intel system such as not being able to use ECC RAM.  The nice thing about AMD systems is the chips are not feature crippled and you can use ECC on a desktop system without paying a fortune.  But the AMD Phenom II X4 945, while cheaper than the Intel Core i5-2500K just doesn’t seem like a wise choice.

• OCZ Vertex 3
  • OCZ Vertex 3 Preview: Faster and Cheaper than the Vertex 3 Pro – AnandTech
  • Final Words : OCZ’s Vertex 3: Second-Generation SandForce For The Masses
• Intel Core i5-2500K
  • The Sandy Bridge Review: Intel Core i7-2600K, i5-2500K and Core i3-2100 Tested – AnandTech

Running SSD’s in RAID can get very expensive very quickly.  A more cost effective solution is to have a disk RAID and use an SSD as a cache.  I’m not sure if any of these are production ready but all are worth watching:

• zfs-fuse - supports the ZFS L2ARC feature which can be used to setup an SSD as a cache for a ZFS pool.  Checksums SSD data and supports multiple devices.
  • ZIL and L2ARC cache questions
  • ZFS – zpool ARC cache plus L2ARC benchmarking
  • How stable is zfs-fuse 0.6.9 on Linux?
• bcache - a recent project for caching linux block devices. Currently only supports 1 cache device and offers no checksumming.
  • Bcache: Caching beyond just RAM
  • Want to use an SSD as cache? Now you can
• flashcache - created and released by and for facebook this at least seems to be in production. documentation is not great however.
• Facebook releases Flashcache

Abandoned Projects:

While choosing an SSD may be difficult at the moment, other components for a solid workstation are not.  Here’s what I’ve been looking at for the past few months:

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I’ve been researching the value range of SSD’s.  The most important thing to find out with an SSD is what controller it’s using.  SSD’s with the same controller tend to have nearly identical performance characteristics.  Since hdparm supports TRIM I started looking for an SSD which supported TRIM in the $100 – $200 range.  Here’s what I’ve uncovered:

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