ZFS Informative SSD Benchmark

[gpw928]

Vermaden's Valuable News – 2022/09/19 has a link to a great article on Exploring the Best ZFS ZIL SLOG SSD with Intel Optane and NAND.

It looks at the relative performances of various types of (mostly enterprise class) SSDs, with mixes of SATA, NVMe (U2, M2, and PCIe), and Optane devices. They looked at throughput, IOPS, and latency.

There's are clear separations in the results. It's a good read.

 

[Andriy]

Just a note that the article is about 5 years old. Generally, it just confirms that NVMe is much better for SSDs than SATA/SAS.

 

[gpw928]

Just a note that the article is about 5 years old. Generally, it just confirms that NVMe is much better for SSDs than SATA/SAS.

Yes, the inclusion of Optane should have alerted me to that.

What I took away was a much better understanding of the relative advantages of NVMe over SATA with both transfer rates and latency. There's also a reminder that NVMe M.2 can be handicapped by PCIe x2 (as opposed to x4).

 

[Deleted member 67440]

Today they are essentially useless, with the units that are now (basically) all solid state
One of the almost unique advantages of zfs is to easily mirror NVMe drives, both on the motherboard and on PCIe cards (which is more common in servers), out-of-the-box
Read-only systems even from RAM disk are becoming more and more common, for cuts even medium loads (~ 250 / 500GB)

 

[mer]

NVME, SSD/SATA/SAS
I believe that at the very bottom, the devices are the same or very similar. The biggest difference is in the front end, how they are accessed.
SATA/SAS SSD emulate a "disk" interface so translate from that (Cylinder/Head/Sector) to the flash device.
NVME doesn't do the translation (by design) so it can be much faster.

 

[Deleted member 67440]

In fact LBA translations, not CHS anymore

 

[mer]

In fact LBA translations, not CHS anymore

Yep. I was trying to imply "theres a translation layer that makes the flash device look like a spinning disk drive instead of just a flash device". Thanks for the correction.