Random notes on Storage IO Performance

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...