Solid State Disk Drives Are Here

I/O, Continued

As the next benchmark shows, flash-based HDDs are great to serve data quickly, but they cannot store data fast enough in server-like environments.

To note, the Webserver benchmark workload does not write any data at all; all it does is request small data blocks randomly - which is what SDDs can do best. Results of 3,000 I/O operations per seconds, or over 5,000 I/Os per second for a RAID 0, are metrics even huge RAID arrays with eight hard drives cannot achieve.

This last I/O benchmark again involves write operations, which leads to the results we already saw when using the database or fileserver benchmark patterns. Again, the flash-based SSD by SanDisk cannot beat the performance of conventional hard drives.