* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 20:59 ` geoff
@ 2013-05-03 21:51 ` Matthew Veety
2013-05-03 21:58 ` cinap_lenrek
` (2 subsequent siblings)
3 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Matthew Veety @ 2013-05-03 21:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
I tried putting venti on an ssd with similar results. Fossil, kenfs, and cwfs all worked fine on that drive though. I think it was one of the earlier Intels.
On May 3, 2013, at 16:59, geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> I tried putting our index on a single OCZ SSD and it died during buildindex.
> The SSD was completely unresponsive thereafter, which is pretty
> appalling behaviour for a storage device. Having since sworn off
> OCZ, I would try again with a pair of Intel 330s in a RAID.
>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 20:59 ` geoff
2013-05-03 21:51 ` Matthew Veety
@ 2013-05-03 21:58 ` cinap_lenrek
2013-05-04 1:59 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-03 23:59 ` Charles Forsyth
2013-05-04 1:16 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
3 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: cinap_lenrek @ 2013-05-03 21:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
i have 60GB intel ssd in my new fileserver holding the
cwfs worm cache. no problems so far. but the machine is
just up for two weeks.
its an experiment. if it breaks i have spare sata drive
that could replace it. the worm is on a mirror with
traditional mechanical harddrives.
cpu% cat '#S/sdC0/ctl'
inquiry INTEL SSDSC2CT060A3
config 0040 capabilities 2F00 dma 00550040 dmactl 00550040 rwm 16 rwmctl 0 lba48always off
model INTEL SSDSC2CT060A3
serial BTMP31010344060AGN
firm 300i
feat lba llba smart power nop ata8 sct
geometry 117231408512
alignment 512 0
missirq 0
sloop 0
irq 2233361 2233358
bsy 0 0
nildrive 3
part data 0 117231408
part plan9 63 117226305
part 9fat 63 204863
part nvram 204863 204864
part fscache 204871 67313735
--
cinap
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 21:58 ` cinap_lenrek
@ 2013-05-04 1:59 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-04 4:17 ` cinap_lenrek
0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: erik quanstrom @ 2013-05-04 1:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
On Fri May 3 17:59:27 EDT 2013, cinap_lenrek@gmx.de wrote:
> i have 60GB intel ssd in my new fileserver holding the
> cwfs worm cache. no problems so far. but the machine is
> just up for two weeks.
as long as we're straying from venti, i'll say that i've used ssds
in ken's file server as both cache and worm drives. there
were no problems at all. i've mostly used various intel drives,
which have performed in accordance to all published specs.
i've also used ocz drives as boot drives to hold nvram. no
problems. perhaps this is the proverbial faint praise.
on the subject of ken's file server / cwfs, it makes the most sense
to me to use ssds as worm, not cache. bandwith to the cache
isn't important as long as you don't blow the ram cache. but
anything that isn't in the ram cache but is on the worm tends
to be randomish access. ssds to very well at at random access,
and write once decreases pressure on many things that make
implementing a flash drive hard.
i would expect similar from venti, which has an even more random
data access pattern.
- erik
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:59 ` erik quanstrom
@ 2013-05-04 4:17 ` cinap_lenrek
2013-05-04 6:17 ` erik quanstrom
0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: cinap_lenrek @ 2013-05-04 4:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
cwfs copies the blocks from worm into the cache on read.
so the working set is served from the ssd and the ram
buffer cache. reading /n/dump would hit the mechanical
disk tho.
--
cinap
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 4:17 ` cinap_lenrek
@ 2013-05-04 6:17 ` erik quanstrom
0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: erik quanstrom @ 2013-05-04 6:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
On Sat May 4 00:18:46 EDT 2013, cinap_lenrek@gmx.de wrote:
> cwfs copies the blocks from worm into the cache on read.
> so the working set is served from the ssd and the ram
> buffer cache. reading /n/dump would hit the mechanical
> disk tho.
that's an option for ken's fs. i haven't found that it's fast
enough because the latency to retrieve a block that's not
in the cache is the latency for read(worm)+read(cachebkt)+
write(cache). if one keeps the cache small, the read of
the cachebkt goes away. therefore it's best to keep
cachesize << wormsize.
- erik
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 20:59 ` geoff
2013-05-03 21:51 ` Matthew Veety
2013-05-03 21:58 ` cinap_lenrek
@ 2013-05-03 23:59 ` Charles Forsyth
2013-05-04 1:31 ` cinap_lenrek
2013-05-04 5:50 ` Charles Forsyth
2013-05-04 1:16 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
3 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Charles Forsyth @ 2013-05-03 23:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
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On 3 May 2013 21:59, <geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com> wrote:
> I tried putting our index on a single OCZ SSD and it died during
> buildindex.
> The SSD was completely unresponsive thereafter, which is pretty
> appalling behaviour for a storage device.
>
I had similar problems with OCZ. I was only copying venti state (as raw
partitions) from one drive to the ssd.
I haven't tried again with other makes, mainly for lack of time.
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 23:59 ` Charles Forsyth
@ 2013-05-04 1:31 ` cinap_lenrek
2013-05-04 1:41 ` Devon H. O'Dell
2013-05-04 1:47 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 5:50 ` Charles Forsyth
1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: cinap_lenrek @ 2013-05-04 1:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
ocz seems to have a bad reputation. just googled "intel ssd broken"
and you get tons of results from people with broken/dead ocz ssd's.
--
cinap
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:31 ` cinap_lenrek
@ 2013-05-04 1:41 ` Devon H. O'Dell
2013-05-04 1:47 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Devon H. O'Dell @ 2013-05-04 1:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
We've had a lot of success with Intel SSDs, only problem is that they
seem to be in short supply right now. We're also looking at Samsung
SSDs, and they seem to be perhaps even better than the Intel SSDs.
OCZs break often in my experience.
2013/5/3 <cinap_lenrek@gmx.de>:
> ocz seems to have a bad reputation. just googled "intel ssd broken"
> and you get tons of results from people with broken/dead ocz ssd's.
>
> --
> cinap
>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:31 ` cinap_lenrek
2013-05-04 1:41 ` Devon H. O'Dell
@ 2013-05-04 1:47 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 1:51 ` erik quanstrom
1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lyndon Nerenberg @ 2013-05-04 1:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
On 2013-05-03, at 6:31 PM, cinap_lenrek@gmx.de wrote:
> ocz seems to have a bad reputation. just googled "intel ssd broken"
> and you get tons of results from people with broken/dead ocz ssd's.
Disk drive reliability comes and goes with the seasons. For years I only ran Seagate disks, and wouldn't go near WD. Then, after a 30% failure run on < 1 year old Seagates, I switched back to WDs, which have been flawless for me. So far. And Hitachi has drifted in and out of the picture over the years.
Ask anyone else and they will tell you a partially to completely different story. At $80 for a couple of TB, I'll just toss them out when they break. And while SSD isn't anywhere near that inexpensive yet, it's finally down into the price range where you can call it commodity disk. These days I'm paying a bit under $1/GB for SSD. That's cheap enough that I can afford to experiment with smaller sized drives in non-critical applications.
I have a FreeBSD box that's been running off an OCZ Vertex 3 for a few months now without issue. It does regular buildworlds and the like, so I'm not gentle on the write volume. UFS TRIM support seems to work fine, and if you chose to believe the smart stats, the (128 GB) disk is error free after having many TB written to it. Many claim Sandforce disks will blow up well before this. I'm beginning to think otherwise, although my sample space is not statistically significant.
I have a pair of Vertex 4s I haven't installed yet. I'm curious to see how much (or if) the new OCZ controllers work. The benchmarks I've read are impressive. I'm planning to put one into my Mac Mini. If MacOS and its several hundred GB VM footprint can't kill an SSD, nothing will ;-)
--lyndon
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:47 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
@ 2013-05-04 1:51 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-04 1:57 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: erik quanstrom @ 2013-05-04 1:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
> Disk drive reliability comes and goes with the seasons. For years I
> only ran Seagate disks, and wouldn't go near WD. Then, after a 30%
> failure run on < 1 year old Seagates, I switched back to WDs, which
> have been flawless for me. So far. And Hitachi has drifted in and
> out of the picture over the years.
imho, applying 50 years of experience with spinning hard drives with
the relatively new flash memory drive is a suspect comparison.
- erik
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:51 ` erik quanstrom
@ 2013-05-04 1:57 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 2:00 ` erik quanstrom
0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lyndon Nerenberg @ 2013-05-04 1:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
On 2013-05-03, at 6:51 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
> imho, applying 50 years of experience with spinning hard drives with
> the relatively new flash memory drive is a suspect comparison.
Is it? Cheap SSD seems to break as often as cheap spinny disks. According to everyone's anecdotal stories, at least.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:57 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
@ 2013-05-04 2:00 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-04 2:03 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 2:13 ` Kurt H Maier
0 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: erik quanstrom @ 2013-05-04 2:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
> On 2013-05-03, at 6:51 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
>
> > imho, applying 50 years of experience with spinning hard drives with
> > the relatively new flash memory drive is a suspect comparison.
>
> Is it? Cheap SSD seems to break as often as cheap spinny disks. According to everyone's anecdotal stories, at least
well clearly, we must lump everything
that breaks "anecdotally as often"
in the same catagory,
by manufacturer.
- erik
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 2:00 ` erik quanstrom
@ 2013-05-04 2:03 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 2:13 ` Kurt H Maier
1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lyndon Nerenberg @ 2013-05-04 2:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
On 2013-05-03, at 7:00 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
> well clearly, we must lump everything
> that breaks "anecdotally as often"
> in the same catagory,
> by manufacturer.
Exactly. That's where we started this conversation :-)
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 2:00 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-04 2:03 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
@ 2013-05-04 2:13 ` Kurt H Maier
2013-05-04 2:17 ` erik quanstrom
1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Kurt H Maier @ 2013-05-04 2:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 10:00:41PM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > On 2013-05-03, at 6:51 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
> >
> > > imho, applying 50 years of experience with spinning hard drives with
> > > the relatively new flash memory drive is a suspect comparison.
> >
> > Is it? Cheap SSD seems to break as often as cheap spinny disks. According to everyone's anecdotal stories, at least
>
> well clearly, we must lump everything
> that breaks "anecdotally as often"
> in the same catagory,
> by manufacturer.
>
> - erik
>
that was the worst haiku I've ever seen
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 23:59 ` Charles Forsyth
2013-05-04 1:31 ` cinap_lenrek
@ 2013-05-04 5:50 ` Charles Forsyth
2013-05-04 6:22 ` Bakul Shah
1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Charles Forsyth @ 2013-05-04 5:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
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On 4 May 2013 00:59, Charles Forsyth <charles.forsyth@gmail.com> wrote:
> I had similar problems with OCZ.
I ought to have observed that I bought the drive from Fry's as refurbished,
which probably wasn't a good recommendation for a drive that was fairly new.
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-03 20:59 ` geoff
` (2 preceding siblings ...)
2013-05-03 23:59 ` Charles Forsyth
@ 2013-05-04 1:16 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 1:43 ` erik quanstrom
3 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lyndon Nerenberg @ 2013-05-04 1:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
On 2013-05-03, at 1:59 PM, geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> I tried putting our index on a single OCZ SSD and it died during buildindex.
> The SSD was completely unresponsive thereafter, which is pretty
> appalling behaviour for a storage device. Having since sworn off
> OCZ, I would try again with a pair of Intel 330s in a RAID.
A couple of months ago I tried cloning my existing fossil+venti to an OCZ Vertex 3. I did the partitioning and setup by hand and everything seemed to go just fine: the arenas copied and verified, fossil initialized, and I could run and mount the fossil from the SSD, but whenever I tried to boot from it it failed very early on with "I/O error" and that was that. I didn't have any spare time to mess around with it so I just stuck with the existing disk.
I was running a really bastardized mix of old and new boot software, so it's quite possible I screwed up installing the correct MBR and boot loader. But it might also have been a problem with the BIOS or SATA controller on the motherboard -- it's a slightly ancient Supermicro Atom 1U, and it doesn't like SATA hard disks, either (it's currently talking to an IDE disk). I didn't have time to try 9atom.
That said, the limited testing I did with the secondary fossil+venti showed it to be quite zippy, within the limitations of the surrounding motherboard hardware. Certainly it was noticeably faster than the hard disk for, e.g., mk all.
--lyndon
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:16 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
@ 2013-05-04 1:43 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-04 1:50 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 3:41 ` Steven Stallion
0 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: erik quanstrom @ 2013-05-04 1:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
> I was running a really bastardized mix of old and new boot software,
> so it's quite possible I screwed up installing the correct MBR and
> boot loader. But it might also have been a problem with the BIOS or
> SATA controller on the motherboard -- it's a slightly ancient
> Supermicro Atom 1U, and it doesn't like SATA hard disks, either (it's
> currently talking to an IDE disk). I didn't have time to try 9atom.
that sort of machine is 9atom's original raison d'être.
also there were some issues with ide in pio mode recently
fixed. (credit: stallion) you may still want to look at 9atom
even in ide mode.
(i'm not absolving the drive. just saying that there are plan 9
issues affecting your machine.)
- erik
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:43 ` erik quanstrom
@ 2013-05-04 1:50 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2013-05-04 3:41 ` Steven Stallion
1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Lyndon Nerenberg @ 2013-05-04 1:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
On 2013-05-03, at 6:43 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
> (i'm not absolving the drive. just saying that there are plan 9
> issues affecting your machine.)
No doubt. But I got it to the point where it's working quite happily. And it can maintain that steady state until it tips over and dies, at which point I will re-install on much more current kit. I'm getting too old to fight with the hardware any more ;-P
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?
2013-05-04 1:43 ` erik quanstrom
2013-05-04 1:50 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
@ 2013-05-04 3:41 ` Steven Stallion
2013-05-04 4:19 ` cinap_lenrek
1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread
From: Steven Stallion @ 2013-05-04 3:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
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Agreed. There were a couple of surprises in sdata/sdide with some of the
PIO timings.
A bit of a tangeng, but a while back I switched my Plan 9 machines over to
Atom and haven't looked back. The current configuration I use has a pair of
D525 boards with 4GB of DDR3 and a small SATADOM for nvram/9fat. The file
server has a couple of 2.5" trays I use for write cache and a StarTech.com
PCIe 8-port serial card (patch/uart-ox). I've built close to 20 of these
over the last couple of years, mostly as standalone console servers. I've
had good luck with the OCZ's, though I avoid consumer grade drives like the
plague.
Obligatory picture attached.
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:43 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:
> > I was running a really bastardized mix of old and new boot software,
> > so it's quite possible I screwed up installing the correct MBR and
> > boot loader. But it might also have been a problem with the BIOS or
> > SATA controller on the motherboard -- it's a slightly ancient
> > Supermicro Atom 1U, and it doesn't like SATA hard disks, either (it's
> > currently talking to an IDE disk). I didn't have time to try 9atom.
>
> that sort of machine is 9atom's original raison d'être.
> also there were some issues with ide in pio mode recently
> fixed. (credit: stallion) you may still want to look at 9atom
> even in ide mode.
>
> (i'm not absolving the drive. just saying that there are plan 9
> issues affecting your machine.)
>
> - erik
>
>
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