[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> Moving this conversation in a slightly different direction. Does
>> anybody know how to tell a generic SSD to go into a consistent state?
>
> I don't think so, at least not with consumer grade kit. Enterprise grade
> drives will either honor sync requests or have the batteries to ensure
> that data is written properly in case of power loss. Consumer drives
> don't have BBUs, and they lie about sync completion.

I was hoping that firmware programmers would take a standby
or spindown command as a hint that power will be removed soon.
Not doing so doesn't help their benchmark results.   Admittedly, it won't help
during an actual power failure, but it might be useful as part of
OS crash mitigation.

Bill Bogstad