[zfs-discuss] Pure SSD Pool

Orvar Korvar
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:59:55 -0000

I am now using S11E and a OCZ Vertex 3, 240GB SSD disk. I am using it in a SATA
2 port (not the new SATA 6gbps).

The PC seems to work better now, the worst lag is gone. For instance, I am using
Sunray, and if my girl friend is using the PC, and I am doing bit torrenting,
the PC could lock up for a while when there were lots of reads/writes to the
single disk drive. Now It seems that the lock ups and worst lag is gone,
everything runs fluent, it is as if I am the only user.

When I boot the S11E system, there is a white splash screen with "Oracle
Solaris" and a thin red stripe that moves across the screen, from left to
right. With my SSD, I can see two red stripes before the system has booted. With
the old hard disk, I could count to several red stripes before the system
booted, maybe 10 red stripes flowing from left to right on the splash screen. So
yes, the system boots quicker.

But there is a bug with the OCZ Vertex 3, 240GB SSD disk firmware. The firmware
might lock up the PC sometimes. With Win7, the PC will BSOD sometimes. This bug
is well known but OCZ can not debug it successfully yet. The OCZ disk uses a
Sandforce controller, but noone of them has a fix for this bug.

And, the Intel 320 SSD seems to have a serious bug in firmware, where you loose
all your data and the disk size change to 8MB. Google on this to read more about
Intel 320 SSD bug. (I am not sure on this Intel bug).

On Solaris, the OCZ bug manifests as it will lock up an application sometimes.
For instance, I surf the web, or use Gnome Commander, and suddenly the
application will be dark grey and not respond to any actions. I wait for a
while, but nothing happens. So I just kill the application and restart it. This
is annoying. First I suspected it was a bug with S11E, but after reading about
OCZ lockups, I now suspect this is a OCZ bug. What do you say, there is no S11E
bug that behaves like this. no?
--
This message posted from opensolaris.org