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Solid State Drive

SickPuppy

By SickPuppy
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SickPuppy Super Member

SickPuppy

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Is anyone using a Solid State Drive or considering using one. I found this article about the performance of a Solid State Drive

 

"Chris Saleski from Intel's Storage Technologies Group demonstrated an Intel 80GB X25M solid-state drive crushing 7,200-rpm, 500GB Seagate Barracuda drives in benchmarks. The single Intel drive hit 44,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second), while the Seagate array did under 550 IOPS."

 

What performance gain could this offer to a game hosting server? I have found that IOPS of a 7200-RPM drive is not a performance inhibitor on a game server.

 

The only way I can see justifying the additional expense is if the drives are more dependable and have a longer MTBF

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iLight Super Member

iLight

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not high performence, it's more for webhosting, or softwares that write a lot and read a lot in the HDD. SSD disks are like a stick USB. It's very good because it doesn't heater. But their are also expensive and the stockage isn't that great. 25-250go instead of 500-1000go :)

 

The cables are SATA. So no problem with that :p.

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maddanny Veteran Member

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We're using SSDs since years (yes, it's really a very old technology! but by a marketing miracle everyone thinks it's very new :) ) but never on important systems as i dont trust it. Even latest Intel's model can be completely erased by a little electrical shock (the same thing on a mechanical drive will - in worse case - destroy interface card but not datas).

For game servers SSD will just increase server's price and will just decrease maps loading by 1 or 2 seconds :) For my their only advantage is that they do not heat at all (sure, for 1 server it doesnt count, but for hundreds with 2 or more HDD ...)

 

FYI, SSD & USB keys are not same technology. There are a lot of differences, you'll found a lot of usefull informations on Intel's website.

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  • 3 weeks later...
SickPuppy Super Member

SickPuppy

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not high performence, it's more for webhosting, or softwares that write a lot and read a lot in the HDD. SSD disks are like a stick USB. It's very good because it doesn't heater. But their are also expensive and the stockage isn't that great. 25-250go instead of 500-1000go :)

 

The cables are SATA. So no problem with that :p.

 

I was not thinking about the game server installs. I don't think there would be much of a noticeable difference in performance putting the game installs on a SSD. Where I was thinking the best performance gain would be is having the operating system and page files on the SSD. The increased read and write on the page files would have a dramatic impact on the system performance. Page file read and write time is a big bottle neck on the overall system performance and with faster PF response you should be able to run larger PFs without having a negative impact of system performance.

 

Well I am building another one of our standard servers but this time I am adding a 30 gig SSD it only increased the overall cost by $80. I will place the operating system and page files on it and see what happens. If we see a noticeable increase in performance we will start replacing all the operating system drives in our servers.

 

We will have a second install of the OS on one of the standard drives just incase.

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KingJ Super Member

KingJ

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Well I am building another one of our standard servers but this time I am adding a 30 gig SSD it only increased the overall cost by $80. I will place the operating system and page files on it and see what happens. If we see a noticeable increase in performance we will start replacing all the operating system drives in our servers.

 

We will have a second install of the OS on one of the standard drives just incase.

 

Keep us updated on this, i'm interested to see how much of a boost a SSD will provide in the game server industry. It may be good for games though, as sometimes there are a lot of random reads which the low latency would benefit from.

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KingJ Super Member

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I have a Caviar Black in my Desktop and it's pretty good. Anyways, ideally you would only want to put things that are read from the disk on the SSD. Over time SSDs will wear out due to excessive writing.

 

Yes, they wear out, but most SSDs now employ wear levelling and are good for at least 100,000 writes if not more per sector.

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SickPuppy Super Member

SickPuppy

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Hey dude,

 

If your looking for the best 7200 HDD for game servers,

Pickup 2x 750GB Caviar Blacks 32M Cache - Raid 0 = Nothing stops them

Replaced a velociraptor in one of our dedis and it benchmarks 20% faster!

loads of articles about them on google, just search ;)

 

 

We run 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 on a few of our servers. There is a performance boost but I don't think it is necessary for game servers.

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RackGaming Senior Member

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We run 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 on a few of our servers. There is a performance boost but I don't think it is necessary for game servers.

 

Depends how many servers your running, If dedi is master (game files etc)

and bandwidth being used via the FSB to HDD's. All of this goes along way in making a decision. We have tried 15K's + 10K's and now 7,200 and all I can say is save you bloody cash! spend on more memory or better cpu, Caviars are all you need.

 

Also with the SSD another member of staff and I were talking about about this thread last night. I dont know much about SSD but he seems to think that SSD are crap because they cannot read from 7 locations on the HDD at a time. Game Servers = More than 7 locations on 1 Dedi (Average 15 servers) so if you went with SSD you would lag out due to Bandwidth on HDD.

 

Of course the above I cannot comment on, But this guy knows his stuff lol.

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KingJ Super Member

KingJ

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Also with the SSD another member of staff and I were talking about about this thread last night. I dont know much about SSD but he seems to think that SSD are crap because they cannot read from 7 locations on the HDD at a time. Game Servers = More than 7 locations on 1 Dedi (Average 15 servers) so if you went with SSD you would lag out due to Bandwidth on HDD.

 

A HDD can't read from more than 1 location at a time, if you've ever looked inside you will see that there is a read head. For data to be read from a hard drive, the read has to be positioned over the correct area and the disk spun round so that the data is under the head to be read. This isn't a problem for sequential reads, such as one big file but for random reads, such as 7 servers accessing their respective locations the head goes mad. Remember there is a 9ms delay at least in repositioning the head.

 

SSDs on the other hand have almost 0ms delay in accessing the data, due to their nature they can go straight to the position, no head positioning or spinning required. I don't think they can handle multiple concurrent reads, but as stated above a hard drive can't either. The 0ms access time makes it much faster than a hard drive at loading lots of random data, like game servers like to do.

 

I'm no expert either, but this is my understanding of it, and pretty much confirmed by other sources on the web.

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SickPuppy Super Member

SickPuppy

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Ok we how have a server up that is running a SSD as the primary drive. We are only using it for the operating system and page files.

 

As soon as we brought the server on line and installed a few RAM hog games we noticed an increase in the overall server performance. We think the primary boost in performance is coming from the read and write capabilities to the page files. Over the next few weeks we will experiment with larger and larger page files to determine where the limit will be.

 

On a standard 7200 RPM drive we have noticed degradation in system performance as the size of the page files were increased. So far we have been able to dramatically increase the size of the page files with out any loss in performance.

 

America’s Army and COD WAW seem to greatly benefit from the increased speed and size of the page files.

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dxtup Junior Member

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I think it's usually recommended to not put your page file on an SSD because it's reading/writing so much. Some people just make a partition on a new regular HDD where it will still be pretty fast because it'll be near the outer disk area.

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VicToMeyeZR Super Member

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your correct about the reading/writing a lot.... BUT.

 

the Low end life expectancy of a decent SSD is now at what 5 years..? And that is regardless of how many times you read/write. What standard hard drive can match that? Not to mention the access time is pretty much nil...

 

And no putting your page files on a standard HD is not the correct answer, because as they will tell you, performance is greatly effected by the size of the page file...

 

I believe sickpuppy has the right idea on this one. I have been looking at SSD's for a while now, and thought about using them.. I just hadn't seen/heard much of anyone using them on game servers... Pending sick puppies results, we may go ahead.

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HGN-Daniel Super Member

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Why do you even need a page file? Buying an SSD just for the page file is kind of a waste, no? Set it to 0 and make it use your RAM.. that's what it's there for. Most of these servers have 4-8gb of RAM.. that's more than plenty to go without a page file (as far as I understand). If anything it should be faster with no page file.. RAM is much faster than SSD. Maybe a hardware guru could enlighten us?

 

Also, I think SSD actually has lower write speeds than a regular SATA drive - so it would be counter-intuitive to put the page file on it.. but the read transfer rates are amazing on the SSD. They both have their catch 22's I guess..

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{-SMAKU-}_MotorMouth Super Member

{-SMAKU-}_MotorMouth

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Why do you even need a page file? Buying an SSD just for the page file is kind of a waste, no? Set it to 0 and make it use your RAM.. that's what it's there for. Most of these servers have 4-8gb of RAM.. that's more than plenty to go without a page file (as far as I understand). If anything it should be faster with no page file.. RAM is much faster than SSD. Maybe a hardware guru could enlighten us?

 

Also, I think SSD actually has lower write speeds than a regular SATA drive - so it would be counter-intuitive to put the page file on it.. but the read transfer rates are amazing on the SSD. They both have their catch 22's I guess..

 

Because some games will not work without a pagefile. When watching it open a rar file on the SSD vs HDD you see a big difference between the two. The SSD is way faster by 2 minutes for a 1.4gb file.

 

Can I ask, what brand and model your are using for your testing?

 

AS, I am sure you are aware, there are HUGE price differences in them, and I would hate to buy a "cheap" on and have it crash, but if it is just as reliable as an expensive one, why waist the money, right? lol

 

OCZ

 

We figure you can read about it, but until you try it, you will never know for sure. Most companies like Seagate, WD and the others will start to switch over now. With the chip in overstock and the prices dropping it's only going to get cheaper.

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SickPuppy Super Member

SickPuppy

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the Low end life expectancy of a decent SSD is now at what 5 years..? And that is regardless of how many times you read/write. What standard hard drive can match that? Not to mention the access time is pretty much nil...

 

And no putting your page files on a standard HD is not the correct answer, because as they will tell you, performance is greatly effected by the size of the page file...

 

 

Vic is right an SSD should last 5 years regardless of how many times you read/write to it. Right now it is not cost effective to use them for game installs but running the OS and Page Files seems to improve the overall system performance.

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SickPuppy Super Member

SickPuppy

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would you be so bold as to put a % increase on that? Did you run load tests? Any other tests you are running?

 

Give us the know man.. Curious minds want to know. :)

 

 

Can't put a % on it yet we are going to load the box up with some heavy RAM usage games this week I should have more info soon.

 

I recommend you purchase a small SSD and play around with it. The results you achieve will depend on you server setup. Right now I don’t think they are cost effective for use as the game install drive.

 

As far as the operating system and page files, the performance increase makes a small SSD worth the additional expense.

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