Metaluna wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:
The biggest unknown question is how will they be priced. I personally don't care about IOPS for my home PC use. I care more about price, reliability, boot time, random read, and random write performance. Any drive that does well on random r/w MB/s will exceed my desire for sequential R/W speeds. And since I'll underformat/overprovision the IOPS capacity will be higher than quoted not that I'll ever push the IOPS limit.
But aren't IOPS and random R/W performance intimately related? I mean, a drive that can deliver 10,000 4K random reads is going to be slower than one than can do 50,000. Or is IOPS some bogus number like MIPS that is just the upper limit of what the controller can handle when doing some trivial operation?
Hmm I'll try a car analogy first as everyone loves those
MB/s is a rate like miles per hour
IOPS is a rate like cars per hour
I want my SSD to boot the OS faster so I want more MB/s
I don't want my PC to handle booting the OS for thousands of users in North America so I don't care about IOPS. Say booting a PC will (totally random numbers don't fixate on the quantity)
read 1TB
write 1MB
all in 30,000 operations over a 15 to 60 second period.
A SSD with 450MB/sec read and 20,000 IOPS would do that faster than a SSD with 250MB/s read and 10,000 IOPS but a SSD with 250MB/sec read and 50,000 IOPS capability wouldn't be faster than either.
now say you want to launch 8 virtual PCs to test a network for a college course or just for the fun of it and now you have a load of
read 8TB
write 8MB
all in 240,000 operations over 15 to 480 second period (depending on if the hardware can keep up)
In this case a infinitely fast MB/s drive would be bottlenecked by transaction processing in those operations if it were rated for anything less than 16,000 IOPS (240,000 divided by 15 secs).
Again these are totally made up numbers for the sake of a theoretical discussion of terminology.
Another comparison would be graphics cards. They have a processor and ram on each card. Some programs are limited by the processor being too slow, some are limited by the ram being too slow. Some are limited by both being too slow.
None of the numbers are meaningless. It just matters what you are doing as to how much they mean to you at that moment.
I'm a little sleepy as I've been up for 18+ hours now but I hope that was coherent enough to help you understand.
I multitask, it's common for me to have dozens of Firefox tabs/windows going + an email client + a game + windows calculator + a text editor and/or HTML editor. So yeah I'm sure if I try hard enough (restoring a prior firefox session, even a normal boot) there might be some split seconds where IOPS would be a bottleneck for me. I'm just saying it isn't likely to be a concern if I understand correctly.
I won't swear that I'm right and someone may link to an article telling us how many IOPS occur in a typical windows boot. But at least we can discuss the concept until then.