While the other answer here beings up some points, your specific issues are due to platform limitations and OS configuration: You’re throughput-limited by the use of consumer SATA SSDs on an HP Smart Array P410 RAID controller. SATA disks run at 3.0Gbps (3G) on these controllers rather than 6.0Gbps (6G). So that’s a barrier that … Read more
Are you hitting swap? Generally, the better solution is to avoid that entirely, or at least make it so that things which are swapped out are genuinely not in active use, so that the speed doesn’t matter. Put your money into more RAM. This is particularly true because while high-end SSD drives may improve performance, … Read more
Some controllers allow to flash drive firmware with built-in utilities (adaptec does for sure), but anyway – it’s not safe, especially for arrays. Even utilities can do that – I won’t. It’s better to update drives one-by-one and rebuild them. There is a risk that drives might not work after firmware flash and in case … Read more
Which is faster SSD or Memory DRAM is faster than NAND flash. A RAM access is on the order of 100 ns, while a SSD random read around 16,000 ns. Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know You need to do a systematic analysis of what is happening and why. Do not change things merely because … Read more
The 200GB SSD disk that you see is called Instance storage (or ephemeral storage) and is destroyed everytime you stop the instance and created new every time you start the instance. That means two things: Don’t store any precious data you want to retain over stop/start – it will be all gone when you stop … Read more
I don’t think so, not at this time. They’re expensive, it’s a relatively new technology that’s not without its own problems; Jeff Atwood has an interesting blog post about the advantages and disadvantages of using them. Given your intended use case the need for an SSD seems even smaller. You normally see huge benefits when … Read more
Intel SSDs do keep statistics on total writes and how far through it’s likely lifespan it is. The following is from an Intel X25-M G2 160GB (SSDSA2M160G2GC) # smartctl -data -A /dev/sda smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART … Read more
ATA Secure Erase is part of the ATA ANSI specification and when implemented correctly, wipes the entire contents of a drive at the hardware level instead of through software tools. Software tools over-write data on hard drives and SSDs, often through multiple passes; the problem with SSDs is that such software over-writing tools cannot access … Read more
You’re both wrong (maybe?)… ext3 is coping the best it can with having its underlying storage removed so abruptly. Your SSD probably has some type of onboard cache. You don’t mention the make/model of SSD in use, but this sounds like a consumer-level SSD versus an enterprise or industrial-grade model. Either way, the cache is … Read more
Being able to run fstrim on the / partitions would be the best solution however with they way your ESXi is configured it would not be possible. You need to be able to enable discards on both the VM and the storage device. Trying to reduce to size of a partition or logical volume with … Read more