SSD Drives

[tomsyr]

Has anyone tried the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive on PiAF yet?
http://www.aselabs.com/articles.php?id=5609
It seems like it would be an excellent choice for a drive in an enterprise setting.
Thanks

 

[vcallaway]

I have a mini-itx system using an SSD. It has been up and running about 5 months now. So far so good. I like that the computer is completely silent.

I'm putting one together for home use and ordered one of these picoUPS units.. I'm curious to see how well it works.

 

[Braxus]

Would consider an SLC based SSD over the more common MLC based ones for longer flash write endurance/reliability. However, if your system won't be pushing a lot of I/O, modern MLC SSDs such as the one you've mentioned can usually live up to the task for light-medium duty work.

The particular drive you linked is a rebranded Intel X25-M with half of it's I/O nerfed; still an excellent drive when compared to the competition.

Another thing to consider is lot of comsumer level MLC SSDs these days are using larger caches to improve performance. This can be extremely dagerous if you experience a power failure and the cache doesn't flush out all the data in time causing data loss.

 

[yellowtail]

I did some research before I bought mine and SLC is the recommended SSD for servers. I'm testing now OCZ agility series SLC 64GB (CDN$400) in an ubuntu server setup, focusing on MySQL performance and I see 20-30% improvement over SAS drive

 

[FitnessPlus]

SSD seems like overkill at the current prices for a PBX unless you're shooting for silence. I have a laptop that I got fed up with the 4200 RPM drive in and really liked an SSD there, but an enterprise class 10K RPM drive will be better bang for your buck in a server than an SSD in a PBX situation.

We do have a server running where I work with 2 Quad Core Nahalem Xeon processors and 4 Intel X25-E drives in RAID 5, and it's not a whole lot faster than other servers running 15k RPM SCSI drives...that is until you start benchmarking MySQL, which is what the box is designed for.

Unless you plan on running a lot of I/O like a heavy MySQL load, I think SSD is overkill for the price.

 

[Braxus]

In this case, think what most folks are considering when putting in an SSD is not so much the performance increase but the increased reliability vs traditional mechanical hard drives.

 

[FitnessPlus]

Maybe more reliability than a drive from a big box retailer, but Enterprice Class drives are pretty reliable. Check out this drive from Western Digital (I'm using them as an example because the information was easy to find).

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=610

That drive is rated at 1,200,000 Hours MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure)
This means they expect that on average this drive should be able to spin 24/7 for 136 years before it fails. Sure some drives will fail before then...and some will fail after then if they're still in use

My point is that Enterprice Class Hard Drives are already really reliable and an MLC based drive may actually be less reliable...made more accute with your previously stated issues with large cache.

 

[dswartz]

true, but an SSD drive won't be vulnerable to mechanical impact the same way a HD will.

 

[FitnessPlus]

I'll conceed the point about mechanical impact. Any PBX that you intend on moving around a significant amount might be well served with an SSD in it. So if you're in the Telephony Service industry and have a demo unit or something that gets moved a lot an SSD might be a good idea.

An SSD's might also be a good idea if you plan on playing rugby in your server closet. This will of course be a necessity when G4 and ESPN merge and the DFL (Datacenter Football League) starts up.