[ale] XFS on Linux - Is it ready for prime time?

[Pat Regan]

On 04/22/2010 11:36 PM, Brian Pitts wrote:
> You're making me nervous! I got a second-generation X-25M a couple
> months ago. So far, it's been great. I haven't done any real disk
> benchmarking, but bootchart shows throughput over 270MB/second, and
> booting takes less than 15 seconds. I can do tons of seek-intensive
> operations and the system never lags.
>

I am more disappointed than nervous...  Other than running a few 
benchmarks early on, I am actually very kind to my SSD.  I don't have 
any swap on there (compcache/ramzswap is awesome, btw) and I keep my 
browser cache on tmpfs.

I'm not reading about high failure rates anywhere, either.  I don't like 
hardware that repeatedly fails on me, though.

Both failures were fairly similar.  The first failure was after apt-get 
installed a kernel update.  I rebooted.  Everything was happy during the 
shutdown, but the drive was awol on bootup.

My battery died on me this time.  I plugged back in, powered up, and 
there was no drive.

My gut is telling me that there is something not quite right with these 
drives.  I'd feel better if there was another firmware update :p.

It is hard to beat the speed.  My old laptop was limited by its SATA 
chipset to 142 MB/s read speeds.  I don't remember the exact numbers I 
got on this new laptop, but I do know they were right around the limits 
of SATA II.

It's the random access that is awesome.  My old laptop was stuck using 
the PIIX driver and was limited to about 4,000 seeks per second.  I was 
breaking 16,000 seeks per second on this laptop.

This second failure has me investigating alternatives.  The Corsair Nova 
128 looks interesting.  It beats or ties the X25M on most tests and has 
a better price per gig.  I might have to buy one if my X25 fails again...

Pat