Is solid state up to an ESE challenge?

~Eric
and I were at Fry's the other day, when we stopped by flash
drives ... we were debating how long until we see ESE (well Exchange
specifically, though I'm more concered about laptops) on such
drives.  With the advent of larger and large capacity SSDs, and
even commercial level drives like these, becoming ever more imminent,
such a possibility looms nearer and nearer.  And with a few ESE
consumers on the client O.S. I expect we will be seeing our databases
on SSDs on laptops within the year (maybe two).

We were discussing the various rumors about how fast they are at read vs. write, how low latency are the reads/writes, +how
reliable+ (if you remember there was always this issue with earlier
drives, SSD can only be written to so many times), how good at
random IO, and other properties that would make them useful as Exchange
storage, or at least whether they will be causing us problems on
laptops.  So curious was I, that of my own accord (and with my own
money I'll note) I went ahead and
bought about $100 worth of flash drives for running through our little JET engine, see if they survive ...

Here is a list of the drives I acquired (except the last one, being a control of sorts that I already owned):

 [1] For all units, the cost was rounded up by 1 cent to
non-retardo-consumer values.  Tax was not added, but it applies
here in Washington, 8-something% or so.

 [2] I really wanted a larger Sony, but the 2 GB was $70
(too much), and I couldn't find a 512 MB or 1 GB unit anywhere on the
shelf.  Sigh.  :P

 [3] Documentation claimed it was on web site (www.pqimemory.com),
but couldn't find it in a generous 40 seconds of searching.

 [4] This one was an incredible value, it was
actually $70 in the store, but until 3/5/2007(so only today, yeah sorry for the late notice) you get a $45 rebate if you buy it at Fry's.

All such drives claim USB 2.0 compliance on the
packaging, except perhaps the USB Hard Drive, not sure about that one.

I don't want to rate these drives based on arbitrary tests[5], such
as whether it comes with a wrist strap, retractable USB plug, etc ...
we want our analysis to be on serious benchmarks that tell us if these
have the capability to back a real ESE database load / support
Exchange, and so we start our tests ...

Test 0; Part A: Getting the packaging off...

I've
definately no love of the ridiculously tough plastic modlded packaging
that these things come in ... and so I decided as the preliminary
test in our evaluation we would test the difficulty of removing the packaging and installing the
drive.

 (lower is better)

4.0    Drive A (SanDisk Cruzer) had
unusually tough to cut plastic, and an asymetrical shape as well (making getting the scissors to purchase hard) as very
large borders making the entire thing very tough to cut open.
2.0    Drive B (Kingston
DataTraveler) had somewhat better packaging, thin-ish borders, and
slightly easier to cut, but 4 sided seals
2.8    Drive C (Sony MicroVault)
Pretty easy to cut, reasonable sized shoulder, and only sealed on 3
sides (e.g. where the plastic is like heat fused).
3.4    Drive D (PQI U230) hardish to
cut, but only sealed on 3 sides, last side is bent over, so easy to
open after 3 sides.

4.4    Drive E (Patriot XPorter) had
very tough packaging, the fused seal of plastic was right up against
the part where the plastic turns vertical, so there was very little
"shoulder" to cut along.
1.5    Drive F (AComdata USB Hard Drive) this
was (IIRC) "saran wrapped" cardboard box, which is the ultimate in
usable packaging.

Now, you might say this ranks up there with the
wrist straps, and claim that my testing is not enough... no, no, if you
have got to build an Exchange drive off 10s or 100s of these,
you're going to start to care how hard it is to get them out of thier
plastic, this would be a serious TCO issue.

Part B: Installing the drive ...
Installing
the drive consisted of plugging in the drive, change to the drive ("g:"
or "h:" usually),"mkdir \SSDBashData", "cd SSDBashData", and running my
test script (I'll publish this soon) to make sure everything is working
and it can at least store a results file (no verification that the file
written is the file stored).  Sort of a pre-race inspection.

3.0    SanDisk gets a base 2.5 for automatically
installing (or maybe just running) software.  And another .5 doc'd
because of how it brought up both a E:\ (CD-ROM RO drive) and an H:\
(USB Mass Storage RW drive), that's just weird.

1.0    Kingston gets as good a score as I will give in this
test, it came up promptly, didn't install any software, AND didn't even
have any "cool programs" on the root of the drive.  Kingston
understands its just producing a stick of storage, and I appreciate
that.

1.5    Sony gets .5 for having data in the root, but it
didn't install / run anything by default that I can tell so that's all
they get.

1.0    PQI like Kingston gets the a plain storage device.  Good job.

2.0    Patriot gets a .5 for bringing up two drives like
the SanDisk.  And .5 because one of the drives had software in
it.  Interestingly both were RW, but the drive with software was
only 24 MBs big, the other was 4 GBs.

1.0    AComdata didn't install anything, came right up, removed properly.

I wanted to complete this step also to verify I could use
the drives w/o accepting any EULAs and checking the documentation that
it didn't have any
DeWitt clauses (the term for the clause in EULAs of products like SQL
Server, Oracle, etc that say you can't
publish benchmark / performance numbers of the product).  I do not
believe ESE has any such limitation by the way (but one would have to
read the Windows OS or Exchange EULAs to be sure).

And
as a plus to make sure that terrible spyware they are all bound to
install is going to be universally installed when I get to performance
tests, surprisingly only one seemed to (not that I looked very hard).

Conclusion:

Total Scores (lower is better):

  SanDisk  = 7.0

  Kingston  = 3.0

  Sony       = 4.3

  PQI         = 4.4

  Patriot     = 6.4

  HD          = 2.5

Since the rest of the tests are likely to be based off metrics,
copy times, IOPS, etc, these subjective and arbitrary test results will
be used to break any ties, to allow the vendor feels maximally cheated
in its ratings. ;)  Next test up serial copy performance ...

Cheers,

BrettSh

[5] Yes I do.  Seriously, the varying sizes of the drives
may throw some of the tests way off, or be difficult to make any claims
of scale ... if I
were doing real testing, I would be making Microsoft pay for the
hardware, getting those larger 32, 64, and 160 GB models mentioned in
some of the
above articles, and probably wouldn't be blogging about it. ;-) 
Sooo ... I
don't actually intend to answer the question posed in the title, just
sort of a check in to see where these cheap flash drives are ... and
they all[3] have warranties so I can always recoup my investment if ESE
makes them catch on fire.