SATA SDD cards

[Robert Simmons]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Rob <lists at midsummerdream.org> wrote:
> Has anyone tried using an SATA SSD card (SATA add-on card that is a SSD
> drive) in FreeBSD?  I was looking at an OCZ RevoDrive and was wondering if
> anyone had tried using one of those specifically, or any SATA SSD card in
> general.

I have not used a SATA SSD card, however, I might steer you away from
OCZ.  I have a regular SSD drive made by them.  When I was
partitioning the drive, I wanted to make sure that the partitions were
aligned with the NAND cell size to maximize the performance of the
drive.  As you may know already the NAND cell size roughly translates
to the "sector" size in HDDs.  On many HDDs the sector size is 512
bytes, but on some newer drives it is 4K, so partitions need to start
on 4K boundaries to be aligned properly.  So, the same sort of thing
is needed with SSD drives, but they are not all 4K, some are 1K, some
are 8K etc. So, I delved deep into OCZs information about my drive
online and I was not able to find information about the NAND cell
size.  I eventually called OCZ, and after a bit of back and forth the
tech I was talked to went and asked his manager then came back and
told me that he is not allowed to give out that information.  He did
tell me that he was told starting the partition at LBA 64 will make
sure that the drive is aligned.

This information helps in one sense, but since there are new options
in gpart(8) in CURRENT that allow you to set the "sector" size to
automatically align partitions properly this information does not help
in the long run.

Buy from a company that doesn't keep their drive specs a mystery.