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Comment by retcore | Hacker News Reader

Company is 3 years old.

https://www.nextorage.net/en/company/

Existing Gen 4 product is very interesting:

"Dynamic SLC caching stores cache size up to 1/3 of the total storage area of SSD"

I want to bench this in a enterprise test. This is a lot of SLC and portends high random 4K writes that are very hard to achieve without something like a Pliops or GRAID array controller.

Claims are, "random read/write up to 1,000 K IOPS", which is three times that of most enterprise drives.

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Dynamic SLC caching is already done on many SSDs. Intel has done it for ages: https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/11/25/intel-dynamic-cache-66...

All this really means is that you use 100% off the SSD in 'SLC' mode, giving you 1/3 the usual space (since most SSDs are TLC these days). As you grow past 1/3 drive full, the drive reverts to TLC mode more and more and the drive slows down. Nothing innovative, as far as I can tell.

That kind of dynamic SLC is fun if you have cash to spare or you want to play around with a brand new drive.

Otherwise what I care about is the minimum SLC size. Or, if it's significantly different, the SLC size when the drive is 80-90% full.

Operating word was "enterprise" :~)

Edit: I think I get your query about "minimum SLC size": I imagine that the cache isn't scaling 1/3 of capacity across all SKUs 1-4TB.

Even in enterprise, buying drives three or four times as big to ensure consistent maximum performance is something you'll only do some of the time.

By minimum, I'm talking about how a dynamic SLC cache is by definition using spare space in the drive. If all those cells are filled up with TLC data, they can't be used as SLC cache. But one drive might guarantee 5GB of SLC cache even when it's near-full, and another drive might guarantee 100GB, and those drives will have very different performance characteristics.

Is 1,000K IOPs really just 1M IOPS?

Or 0.9765625Mi IOPS?

The binary prefixes aren't particularly useful when talking about IOPS. They're useful for storage since a lot of structures are powers of two (eg. 512 byte or 4096 byte sectors), but that doesn't apply to IOPS.

I know, that was the joke :)

Yes. I was quoting from the vendor literature, and thought about changing to 1M IOPS but I think it's quoted this way become the competition is offering ca 300K R4K at best, so the comparison matters.

Curious. Sony is in the headline, but apparently the company was sold to Phison Electronics?

Sony is/was? a joint venture partner

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/phison-acquires-nextorage-...

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