Keeping up with IOPS

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21440/silicon-motion-demos-7-watt-pcie-5-ssd-controller-sm2508

Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced eye-ops) is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN).

Back in the heady days of 2002, I got wise to the coming wave of flash memory based storage devices. I had heard of RAM drives from limited/elite run manufacturers (some of them I’m guessing probably sold to defense contractors). That had DRAM backed by by battery backup and could hold up to 1GB of files, connected by an actual SCSI interface. The whole nine yards.

Cut to 2002 and I’m visiting a friend in Texas, where we go into a giant shopping Mall where they had one of the early (but not the first) Apple Store. I was still very much following technology news/industry trade websites at the time (back when MacWeek was still a thing) and heard of a device called a Kanguru thumb drive. They came in lots of colors sizes but all connected with a USB connector. This arrived at a time when the Zip 100 drive “seemed” like the next big thing (cheap disks) that could hold enough stuff. Surely Intel/Apple would all jump onboard.

I say this somewhat facetiously because many computers from Apple and Intel were’ still stuck on floppy drives (or worse SuperDisks! ew! holding 128MB). But here was this fledgling technology used on smaller scale in niche markets (mostly small snapshot cams, using proprietary form factors like Sony’s “stick” memory cards). But Kanguru had this cute little tchocke, with a USB connector. It didn’t hold as much as a Zip drive or a SuperDrive (much less a Jaz drive! 1GB). But it had USB,… and that my friends was the key. There was no media, no drive to buy, no cables to connect, nor a power supply. It was in a word, “complete”.

Which is to say, it didn’t matter “how much” you could store. It was solving the problem of convenience and WHEN you needed to store something. That was the core problem being solved. And there up on the shelf behind the counter were 8MB, 16MB, 32MB and 64MB Kanguru thumb drives at all price points. But 64MB was an eye-watering $82USD in 2002. Can you imagine. But it smelled and looked like the future. And it was. Performance, storage size be damned. I could plug it into any computer and walk away with up to 64MB of files (pre-YouTube). It held less than a Zip drive, and cost a LOT more than a Zip drive disk itself (I think $5 for 100MB back then). But I had freedom.

Jump forward 22 years later. And now we can do 2+million IOPS on an M2 NVMe SSD. To do even 1M IOPS in 2002 was just barely possible anywhere at any price even for researchers at government labs. Oracle did an attempt at the worlds fastest disk array back then running hundreds and hundreds of SAS (Serial Attached Storage) in multiple stacks of 19″ rack enclosures. I think it was probably 20 racks in total all in parallel and just barely achieved 1M IOPS on spinning rust in 2002 era (that’s also disks spinning at 10,000 rpm btw).

But now, we got manufacturers (Silicon Motion) spitting out a tiny little M2 drive controller (the SM2508 article linked at the top) that can achieve the throughput of two, count ’em, TWO of those 20 rack drive arrays that Oracle engineered into record setting attempt at storage throughput. So a hat tip to 20 years of technology advancements in flash controllers, flash memory chops, circuit board packaging and embedded systems. It’s hard to contemplate the Moore’s law of solid state storage in that time period.