SSD over the network.

[GotNoRice]

I was brainstorming earlier, and I wondered how fast applications would be when accessed from an SSD over the network.

My network is all gigabit, and I rarely see latency above 1ms. That might still hold back the drive a bit but it’s still almost nothing compared to the access time of a mechanical drive. The theoretical max bandwidth of Gigabit is less than the output of the SSD but is still plenty fast.

What I’m thinking is that I could make a shared folder on my SSD and have the other computers in my house have that as a mapped network drive, where they could install certain programs or games to for increased performance. From their end, it should essentially be a drive with a 1-2ms access time and 120+MB/sec across the whole drive, which is still pretty damn fast.

The big unknown here I guess is where TCP/IP overhead comes into play. I know I won’t see the 125MBps theoretical maximum, but I’m also worried that the protocol itself might hurt where the drive is supposed to be it’s strongest (random access of small files).

The best way of course is to just try it, which I plan to later today, but I wanted to get other’s thoughts first. Does this seem like a good idea?

 

[Surly73]

NAS for one person/household sounds like a waste of SSD to me and I suspect you'd never be able to tell the difference with all of the other latencies and bottlenecks at work.

Get a RAM drive utility and test against that over the LAN. If you can't tell a difference between mechanical disk and DDR2/3 you sure won't see a benefit from SSD.

Any consumer grade gigabit stuff is likely crap, so your theoretical maximums are unlikely to ever come anywhere near being achieved unless you're using commercial grade gear at every step of the way.

 

[GotNoRice]

Any consumer grade gigabit stuff is likely crap, so your theoretical maximums are unlikely to ever come anywhere near being achieved unless you're using commercial grade gear at every step of the way.

Well I remember getting pretty close to max gig bandwidth back in 2003 using 8 120gb Western Digital JB drives in Raid-0 and an 8-port Linksys gigabit switch. The Dell Powerconnect 2616 I use now has always performed excellent even at LANparties with heavy file transfers.

I'm not really talking about setting up a dedicated storage server as much as I am talking about simply making a shared folder on my drive. It would still remain my primary drive and that would still be it's main purpose.