Random notes on Storage IO Performance

  • Article

Here are some random notes I took during a presentation to Storage IO Performance this morning:

  • SSDs: Still not a 'solid state' business - https://bit.ly/cdqA1b - "False expectations" and why they "won't replace hard drives" 
  • A PRAM and NAND Flash Hybrid Architecture for High-Performance Embedded Storage Subsystems - https://bit.ly/95ZY83 
  • Resistive RAM Gains Ground - Faith in phase-change memory falters (IEEE Specturm) - https://bit.ly/cBpLB7 
  • SQL Server Best Practices Article - Predeployment I/O - https://bit.ly/9iybIa (great 2007 white paper on SQL storage)
  • Disk Subsystem Performance Analysis for Windows - from 2004, but still very interesting - https://bit.ly/b2uXU1 
  • Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance (from Usenix08) - https://bit.ly/9NjDGp 
  • Resource Monitor shows disk activity per process. In Windows 7, run resmon.exe and go to the "Disk" tab. https://bit.ly/c3jETW 
  • XPerf - Windows Performance Toolkit - https://bit.ly/aFQqvm - Invest the time to understand ETW and XPerf. It will pay off. 
  • Two-minute Introduction to XPerf - https://bit.ly/dApsVU 
  • Reducing Disk I/O Performance Sensitivity for Large Numbers of Sequential Streams - https://bit.ly/9gfWFL 
  • TANSTAAFL - There ain't no such thing as a free lunch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL (also applies to IO perf) 
  • Know your storage path - from the app to the platter - Drivers, device property configuration, hardware configuration

Enjoy...