Seems like the color codes in Table 3 are reversed? Higher write application factors are green and lower ones are red.

Feels like a paper that should have been published about 15 years ago.

We've observed FDP to make a surprisingly big difference in drive internal WA. If you can meaningfully tag different lifetime/stream data from your workloads, and you can expect hardware that supports it, it's very helpful. We some something like WAF reduction from ~1.60 to ~1.04 (on a synthetic but vaguely plausible workload).

> Vendors downplay the idiosyncrasies of specific SSD models by marketing their devices using four “headline” throughput metrics: sequential read, sequential write, random read, and random write.

For SOHO yes, where no serious database usage is expected. But server/datacenter SSDs are categorized: read-intensive, write-intensive and mixed-usage.

Something I learned the hard way is that SSD performance can nosedive if DISCARD/TRIM commands are not sent to the device. Up to 50% lower throughput on our Samsung DC drives.

Through metrics I noticed that some SSD in a cluster were much slower than others despite being uniform hardware. After a bit of investigation it was found that the slow devices had been in service longer, and we were mot sending DISCARDs to the SSDs due to a default in dm-crypt: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Specialties#Discar...

The performance penalty for our drives (Samsung DC drives) was around 50% if TRIM was never run. We now run blkdiscard when provisioning new drives and enable discards on the crypt devices and things seem to be much better now.

Reflecting a bit more, this makes me more bullish on system integrators like Oxide as I have seen so many times software which was misconfigured to not use the full potential of the hardware. There is a size of company between a one person shop and somewhere like facebook/google where they are running their own racks but they don’t have the in house expertise to triage and fix these performance issues. If for example you are getting 50% less performance out of your DB nodes, what is the cost of that inefficiency?