[geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state Solaris storage

[Joshua Boyd]

On Apr 19, 2008, at 11:42 PM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Solid State Solaris Storage... heh...
>
> Anyway:
>
> I found some industrial USB flash drives.
>
> They are ruggedized, have better algorithms supposedly focused on  
> reliability, and higher quality flash memory.
>
> Unfortunately, they are also 8GB or smaller right now, and quite  
> expensive.
>
> None of them said anything about if their USB interface was more  
> reliable than normal.  Hopefully they are at least very careful to  
> meet specs and not do stupid things.

Have you found any that will directly connect to USB headers?
>
> SATA SSDs: Wow, they are expensive.  However, small ones are fairly  
> reasonable.  You can get a Super Talent 8GB SSD for $150 or so.
>
> That's more than enough room for / and /usr for installing Solaris  
> 10, which in my case would give me two drive bays free for ZFS RAID 1.

When I'm looking at solid state storage for theoretical personal  
projects (as in, none have gotten that far) it is to save physical  
space in the case and to not use of a SATA port

However, at work I may end up finding I need to consider either USB  
booting or SATA SSDs, depending on where we go next for a SBC.

> Expensive, but I'm really giving it a lot of thought.  The SSD  
> units seem to offer a whole lot more writes per block than most  
> other flash media.

I wonder why that is.  I would have expected them to more or less be  
using the same flash as anyone else.

Unless they maybe use a few megs of SDRAM as a cache and find that it  
reduces the number of actual flash erases.  Then they would have to  
include a batter to power it during a final flush of cache to flash.

> I'm not sure if I'll do anything soon or not, but the SSD option  
> keeps getting cheaper, and is looking good.  Yes, the drives are  
> very small, but you get 60MB/sec write, and 45MB sec read, and 8GB  
> is more than enough for a Solaris install.

Of course, you especially get amazing seek speeds.


One idea would be to figure out how to make do with only 4 gigs for  
basic root, then use the other 4 gigs to hold a compressed version of  
the part of the OS that gets installed into a RAID.  That would only  
be useful for storage appliances though, and I can't remeber what the  
target use of the SSD is any more.