FlashFeed

Full text

There are few reasons why one would come all the way to Al-Ghayl, a village in the Al-Aflaj Governorate, around 300 kilometers from Saudi Arabia’s capital city Riyadh.

Perhaps you’re a fan of “Layla and Majnun,” a love story that has reminded many of “Romeo and Juliet” (although, unlike the Shakespearian tragedy, it actually took place some 1,300 years ago). Or, maybe, you’re just briefly stopping here before traveling to Abha. But, even then, you’d be calling at a town named “Layla,” situated on the highway... whereas Al-Ghayl remains hidden away from the main road, around 40 minutes by car from Layla, well into the Aflaj countryside.

Anyway, if you really decide to go to Al-Ghayl, you’ll find the ruins of what was once an imposing palace, perched atop a hill, overlooking the town below. Its walls are made of sturdy rocks mixed with mud. In some places, an outer layer of clay and straw plaster still clings on. One of the walls has fully crumbled onto the hill below, leaving behind a trail of rocks and debris. The wooden ceilings are almost all gone, except for one single room, next to the remains of a tower. In all of this, however, one could still make out the beautiful triangular motives of Najdi architecture. And, if you look closely, you might still see some of the carvings and decorations on the walls.

According to the local historical memory, this palace already existed 400 years ago, when it was inhabited by Saad bin Qabban. It was then passed down to his descendants, known as the Al-Khubsha family. At one point, it saw the arrival of the poet Mohammed bin Farraj Al-Gargah, who dedicated a poem to Al-Ghayl and the generosity of its people.

And now, all this... is almost all gone. The castle, weathered by time, is slowly fading back into nature, alongside the memories of its heyday. It silently sits on this hill in the rural landscape of the Al-Aflaj Governorate, hidden away from most tourists. No restoration project, just a faded sign, quietly announcing “Al Saada Ancient Palace.”

Full text

Micron's 6600 ION SSD boosts random write performance with an unusually large onboard memory design

Benchmark testing exceeded several official performance specifications during enterprise evaluation

Massive 64GB DRAM gives Micron a clear performance advantage over rivals

Micron's new 6600 ION enterprise SSD packs 245.76 TB of QLC flash storage into a single E3.L form-factor drive, and has garnered some high praise in initial reviews.

TweakTown reviewer Jon Coulter awarded the drive a rare 99% score, calling it "the one to beat in its class."

The drive stands out mainly because of its unusually large 64GB of onboard DRAM, an uncommon amount for this capacity class.

Why more onboard memory changes everything

Most ultra-high-capacity SSDs near 256TB, like the DapuStor 245.76TB PCIe Gen5 SSD, use a 16:1 ratio of NAND to DRAM, resulting in only 16GB onboard at this capacity point.

Micron instead uses a 4:1 ratio, giving the 6600 ION a full 64GB of onboard DRAM for indexing random write operations. This larger memory pool lets the drive sustain around 50,000 random write IOPS at queue depth 256, exceeding its 42,000 IOPS spec.

By comparison, competing 245.76TB drives with a 64K IU reportedly manage only about 15,000 IOPS for random writes under similar test conditions.

That performance is reportedly more than three times faster than rival 245.76TB drives built with a smaller 64K indirection unit.

Sequential performance also reaches up to 13,900 MB/s read, and 3,159 MB/s write, both slightly above Micron's factory specification claims.

Random read performance hits roughly 1.78 million IOPS, matching Micron's published specification for the drive exactly under identical test conditions.

These results were measured using an Intel Xeon w7-2495X processor on a PCIe Gen5 platform running Ubuntu Linux, confirming the figures under real enterprise conditions.

Pricing and practical limitations remain unclear

Despite the strong benchmark results, Micron has not published an official price for the 6600 ION at the time of writing.

Reports suggesting a price beyond $100,000 have circulated online, though no listing confirms that specific figure at the time of writing.

Enterprise SSDs at this capacity typically sell through direct vendor contracts rather than public retail listings, making pricing hard to verify.

The drive carries a 5-year limited warranty and supports major operating systems including Linux, Windows Server, and VMware ESXi across enterprise deployments.

It offers a 1-drive-write-per-day endurance rating, a modest figure that still fits typical enterprise storage workloads at this scale.

The drive also includes power-failure protection and full data-path protection, standard features expected in enterprise-grade storage designed for continuous operation.

The benchmark numbers alone do not confirm real-world value, since pricing and support costs remain unknown.

Whether the 6600 ION genuinely leads its category depends heavily on how competitors price similar high-capacity QLC drives over the coming months.

Until official pricing becomes available, claims about its market position should be treated as preliminary rather than fully confirmed.