Posted June 11th, 2009 by chris
So after about a month and a half, and ~15 days of real usage, my Intel X25-E SSD first produced smart errors, then worked intermittantly, then eventually failed.
Some of the warning signs of my X25-E failing were:
- Coming back to my computer, to find it unresponsive.
- Event logs recored write delays and write errors for the SSD device
- SSD disappears from AHCI BIOS screen randomly
- SSD failing SMART checks in BIOS [though my SMART checking programs in windows didn't think anything was wrong. How odd.]
So I’ve replaced this 32GB system drive with….. 2×1TB Western Digital Black drives, running RAID-1. 99$ per from dell. They are actually suprisingly fast, too. Bootup and application use feels good. I’ve got my page file and anti-virus running on my I-RAM, and other apps running from my Acard 9010B [itunes, foxit, wc3, fallout3, chrome, firefox, etc]. I have my 640GB black drive running itunes library and steam games.
I’ve done this like this so that I can try and eliminate bottlenecks with applications loading up. Now that I’ve been used to an SSD [stuff finishing loading before you release your mouse button] it’s a little trying to go back, but I feel pretty good about it. I’ve used the “Mount drive as empty folder” feature in windows to keep my number of drive letters down; I had to have the I-ram as a seperate letter for the page file, but everything else is hidden nicely.
Sorry, this is all pretty boring to you.
One more thing with printing in OS X. Apparently the latest update [10.5.7] has caused some problems for certain people running into an error while trying to add printers.
Running into something like
“Type the name and password of a user in the “lpadmin” group to allow…..”?
Take a read here and run this console command, which seems to restore the admin group to be able to do things owned by lpadmin. Worked slick as heck here.
Posted May 19th, 2009 by chris
System:
Problem: Adding additional instances make the server literally hit the wall for disk access. CPU and memory of host system is within acceptable limits. Host OS is zippy. All instances are running at an incredibly slow speed. Logs per instance show information like so:
May 19 13:35:41.417: vmx| scsi0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.681 seconds (ok)
May 19 13:35:41.417: vmx| scsi0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.681 seconds (ok)
May 19 13:35:41.417: vmx| scsi0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 1.192 seconds (ok)
May 19 13:35:42.823: vmx| scsi0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 1.332 seconds (ok)
May 19 13:35:50.402: vmx| scsi0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 1.105 seconds (ok)
May 19 13:35:53.496: vmx| scsi0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 1.133 seconds (ok)
This is a theory from what I’ve read, but it fits my data, and shutting down one or two VM’s seems to restore disk I/O speeds. Other people have reported similar issues with similar enough hardware. [1] [2]
It seems any VMware server is limited to a certain number of concurrent running clients, due to a limitation for ATA in a guest operating system to read/write to a given number of files simultaneously.
Of course I don’t have any real hard evidence, but it seems to have fixed the issues for now.
Note that installing VMware ESXi hypervisor, and using the correct hardware RAID controller, you can apparently get around this multi-I/O problem
Posted April 16th, 2009 by chris
I’ve been onboard with SSD for a while now, I bought myself a Gigabyte I-RAM a couple years ago, and have been using it for games/windows profile, and later page file for a while. Other than the capacity and price, I’m really happy with it. It ran me about 200$ total, with 4 x 1GB Crucial DDR. Currently this serves on faithfully as my Pagefile, though with 8GB of memory, it’s pretty rare that you need it.
More recently I’ve also bought an Acard 9010B and set it up on my file server [on 24/7] and was running it for OS through E-SATA. It was mildly flaky because of this fact. I’ve relegated this to applications and games, and even though it’s still flaky, it’s still pretty sweet. Cost me just over 400$ for 12GB of space. It’s using 6 2GB Kingston DDR2-533 ECC unregistered sticks I bought on newegg for 21$ each. It’s even faster than the I-RAM because of it’s SATA-II interface. Because of the flakyness [it likes to disappear every other reboot] I’ve shelved it from the glorious life of being my main system drive, now relegated to noncritical applications, like Microsoft Office, Warcraft III and DAOC. 
Now I’m shopping for a reliable, fast Solid State disk. I want the drive to last a long time, be reliable, and be fast.Doing a lot of research you run into questions you have about SSD’s, and I’ve compiled a list of interesting things to read before you buy. I will be updating this more
So far I’ve come to the conclusion that the Intel SLC - X25-E series kicks ass and is the fastest SLC drive around, except drives like the FusionIO and the like. MLC drives, the Intel X25-M [forum thread] is still the king, but the OCZ Vertex Series [forum thread] have overcome initial jMicron Issues and are quite fast, and much more reasonably priced.
More to come as I update the post.