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Hilariously clever stealth ad for Widgetfinger CMS and hosting tool (make sure you read the box at the bottom of the page.) Via Daring Fireball.
- jim 3-28-2009 4:08 pm [link] [add a comment]

Anandtech review of Intel X25-E SLC SSD vs. Seagate Cheetah 15K SAS vs. Western Digital 1TB SATAII RAID Edition.

...[T]he fact that eight [Intel X25-E] SLC drives need 129W less power than eight SAS drives while offering 3 to 13 times better OLTP performance is a small revolution in storage land....

[T]he Intel X25-E is nothing short of amazing: it offers at least 3 to 13 times better OLTP performance at less than a tenth of the power consumption of the classical SAS drives. We frankly see no reason any more to buy SAS or FC drives for performance critical OLTP databases unless the database sizes are really huge. From the moment you are using lots of spindles and most of your hard disks are empty, Intel's SLC SSDs make a lot more sense.
For me these SSD (i.e., solid state drives - no moving parts, data is stored much like it is in memory) are still too expensive. The Intel units run around $12 per GB, while the monsterous WD 1TB drive comes in at an amazing $0.19 per GB. But the SSDs already make sense for some applications, and in a few years the prices will come down. I can't wait. CPU speed almost doesn't matter for what I do (well, it does matter, but they are already so fast and scaling well,) it's disk I/O that is always the bottleneck. So SSDs are how computers in my life will get faster. If not in my next server for sure in the one after that.

- jim 3-28-2009 4:03 pm [link] [add a comment]

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