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Which SSD drive is best for I/O intensive work?

D

Dari

Lifer
My wife uses SAS a lot at work and she's found out that it's best to have 2 HDDs rather than one. Furthermore, the drive with data on it, not the one with OS/Apps, is the one that is hit hardest. So, she wants to replace her Seagate Barracuda with an SSD drive, but which one is ideal for such a function? The people at SAS recommend SSD as well but do not specify which type/brand. What exactly would one be looking for in an SSD drive for this job? Matlab is also I/O intensive and this is their hardware recommendation list.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/choosing_hardware.html
 
If this is for home use, and she knows it will actually be a very IO intensive workload, the 850 Pro or Sandisk Extreme Pro are excellent choices, and make sure to choose a capacity large enough to leave 10-25% overprovisioning.

How sure are you that the workload is very IO intensive? My personal experience with matlab is that my workloads are rarely IO intensive. I do lots of sequential reads, reading in large binary or hdf5 data files, but the bulk of my work is manipulating them in RAM and then writing datafiles/images to disk when I'm done.
 
The last time I used SAS, it was during the 1980s on an IBM-370. The last time I used SPSS, it was with my PC during the 1990s.

So I'm a bit puzzled as to how even vast amounts of statistical data would stress out a hard disk. Maybe -- I guess -- I dunno.

The MatLab link doesn't seem to indicate any inadequacy for long-established storage media (HDDs), and only mentions startup times etc. as benefiting much from SSD speed.
 
The MatLab link doesn't seem to indicate any inadequacy for long-established storage media (HDDs), and only mentions startup times etc. as benefiting much from SSD speed.
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For the MatLab kernel. Mathworks doesn't know what precisely you're planning to do with MatLab, and if you're reading, working on, and writing pieces of really huge datasets (that can't fit into RAM) obviously IO performance will be very helpful.
 
I'd go with a Samsung PRO series. 840 or 850. Either of those are built for a massive amount of IOs before beginning to deteriorate.
 
Data-Medics said:
ummm.... I'm pretty sure SAS didn't exist back then. It came out in 2004.
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SAS -- "Statistical Analysis System" as I recall. They'd actually implemented it for mainframes before PC-pervasiveness. I think their outfit is in "Research Triangle Park," N. Carolina?

Both SAS and SPSS were in use before 1985 -- but not on microcomputer platforms.

Now . . . it would also be true . . . that what was provided then would only be a subset of PC software provided now.
 
Essence_of_War said:
If this is for home use, and she knows it will actually be a very IO intensive workload, the 850 Pro or Sandisk Extreme Pro are excellent choices, and make sure to choose a capacity large enough to leave 10-25% overprovisioning.

How sure are you that the workload is very IO intensive? My personal experience with matlab is that my workloads are rarely IO intensive. I do lots of sequential reads, reading in large binary or hdf5 data files, but the bulk of my work is manipulating them in RAM and then writing datafiles/images to disk when I'm done.
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This is for her work machine. Even though her firm is one of the largest media research firm in the world purchasing decisions are a mess and done locally within teams. Her superior doesn't know what his team needs. The previous purchaser had a better idea. He bought a workstation with 2 HDDs. Her current boss bought some mini Optiplexes that only come with 1 HDD. Now, a similar computation is taking 90 seconds longer compared to the older workstation. This totals out to over 2 hours longer compared to the old workstation with the 2 HDDs. So what did they try to do? Partition the 1 HDD so it looks like the old system. When that didn't work they ran some benchmarks to see what was going on. Turns out that the 2 HDD system was slightly faster because SAS was doing some heavy I/O operations. My wife asked me what I thought and I said, considering that the old workstation and new tiny Optiplex both have 8GB ram, i7s and barracudas, the main issue was the lack of a 2nd physical HDD in the Dell. Also, if they want work done faster, they're better off with an SSD drive as the data drive since it's put to heavy usage.

You'd think the CTO/CIO of the firm would be in touch with the vendors (software and hardware) to figure out what to buy for their researchers and analysts but it's a mess over there.
 
IF you have SAS(Serial Attached SCSI interface); go with that! 8 GB second + vs. SATA 3 - 6GB limit! It usually found in upper end workstations and enterprise servers.
 
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IF you have SAS(Serial Attached SCSI interface); go with that! 8 GB second + vs. SATA 3 - 6GB limit! It usually found in upper end workstations and enterprise servers.
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Again, the OP is not talking about SAS the storage interface. They're talking about SAS the statistics/analysis software package.
 
Woah, 8GB RAM? OK, I have 8GB RAM, but I do mostly PC support.

If cost isn't much of an issue, get a Sandisk Extreme Pro, of whatever the biggest size allowable is...but, include another 8-24GB RAM, too. If you don't end up needing the super duper write performance, the added cost, over a slower SSD, is still a drop in the bucket for a business purchase.
 
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Cerb said:
Woah, 8GB RAM? OK, I have 8GB RAM, but I do mostly PC support.

If cost isn't much of an issue, get a Sandisk Extreme Pro, of whatever the biggest size allowable is...but, include another 8-24GB RAM, too. If you don't end up needing the super duper write performance, the added cost, over a slower SSD, is still a drop in the bucket for a business purchase.
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It's a reasonable guess that a lot of forum members get "daily-deals" e-mails from the Egg.

Today, they're offering up a special bargain on a 400GB+ PNY SSD priced between $90 and $100. I looked at the specs: the sequential read-write performance seems to be what you'd expect from any SSD of that capacity worth its salt.

It's one of those "24-hours-only" offerings; the SSD is ordinarily priced at $180.
 
Cerb said:
Woah, 8GB RAM? OK, I have 8GB RAM, but I do mostly PC support.

If cost isn't much of an issue, get a Sandisk Extreme Pro, of whatever the biggest size allowable is...but, include another 8-24GB RAM, too. If you don't end up needing the super duper write performance, the added cost, over a slower SSD, is still a drop in the bucket for a business purchase.
Click to expand...

Actually, another manager on a different team, thinking memory was the issue, ordered a machine with 32GB of ram. That did not speed up the computations so RAM is not a factor here. I suggested they turn all that extra ram into a ram disk. The extra processor speed from the newer i7s also did not speed things up much either.
 
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