THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

Putting them in as Cache drives.  All of the benefits, none of the pitfalls!

I'm seriously considering it for the performance factor - I reckon a RAID-10 with SSDs would be the go (spot the Aussie? lol) and should allay any concerns over sudden failure.  A rebuild would be super-quick too!  

4 x 64GB drives should do it for a 128GB RAID - not too pricey given the performance boost.

I am in the same camp as you. Although I am using SSD in mobile devices and some workstations, I have yet to put an SSD in a server, boot drive or not. Not that I have really looked into this, but I see higher speed drives in RAID for boot devices still ruling for the following two reasons:

1. I am not at the point of trusting consumer grade SSDs and the others are still too expensive. (Is there hard proof that consumer grade SSDs are more reliable than hard drives?)

2. If the boot drive does not have anything else on it, then the only advantage would be faster boots, right? Most programs are in memory after booting, right? Excluding log file updates, how much reading is actually going on after booting? Would there really be an advantange to using SSD in this case?

Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I think I'll wait and put the money saved into buying more memory.

Not a chance I would do that on a server at the moment. I would also still want the comfort of RAID 10 using SSDs if I were ever to do it in the future.

First I start with a high quality SSD that has a tried a true record (basically only Intel, I've been using their SSDs since I first paid $500 for 80gb, but it took an old Win2k3 VM's boot time from 15 minutes to 45 seconds so it was quite worth it).

Then I make sure I have a backup (of course)

and an SSD spare ready to go or I use RAID-1.

I've only had one Intel SSD die on me in the last 4 years. I still have a handful of G1 drives in service and they have yet to reach their end of life. When they do, they will have a predictable failure as I can use the intel SSD tool to see how many writes are left. In theory, when I hit that limit I'll still be able to read data off of that "dead" drive.

But yes, many SSDs do just up and die without any SMART warnings first. But then again, so do some standard disk drives and most of the time it is the same issue with both -- bad firmware on the controller (Hello OCZ)!

I find the performance boost and reboot speed make it all worthwhile. And in quite a few SBS scenarios where I don't need a ton of storage, I'm doing SSD only setups now and it is costing far less than some of the old "performance" SAS setups I did a few years ago.

It's been awhile that SSD drives were in experimental stage. As Sean stated, the "tried and true" SSDs such as Intel will last for as long as an SAS or other type of HDD. Samsung, Kingston, and others are catching up with Intel in this respect and they cost less than Intel SSDs. Even OCZ has outgrown its baby shoes by now...

The SSD market is far more mature than it used to be and it shows with the maturity of the controllers. Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) for RAID driver version 11.0 or greater support RAID-1, in addition to RAID-0 for the SSD drives. The latest Intel RST also support TRIM for both RAID types, that can maintain the SSD RAID performance and alos extend the life of the drives.

There's no other RAID configuration in RST, where TRIM also would be supported. For the time being RAID-6, RAID-10, etc., is out of question when it comes to SSD and Intel RST...

I have been contemplating using only SSD drives in servers in the future as well.  The interesting thing about raiding SSD drives in my mind is that if they both have the same number of writes/reads lifetime and they are in a raid 1, wouldn't they theoretically go out at the same time?

I guess the only benefit of raid 1 with SSD would be if the controller on one drive went out.  So again, I'm on the fence on whether I would do raid or not and just have a good backup system in place.

I found this 960GB SSD on new egg for $2400.00

www.newegg.com/.../Product.aspx

Looking at Dell, I would pay $4,074 for 6 300GB SAS drives that I would configure in a raid 10 to get the speed of the SSD, 900GB of space (60 less than SSD), and the ability to lose one hard drive.  But for $800.00 more I could get 2 960GB SSD drives put them in Raid 1 and be better off because of the lack of power the SSD drives would use compared to the SAS drives.

I think in the future I will be going with SSD's on servers myself.

Sue, I'm in the boat where I can't say that any hard drive lasts into the 5 year time frame.  After about 3 years, most hard drives I see experience wear-and-tear issues where the motors start to fail or the controller gives out.  When you look at the cost and performance of SSD's versus the relative performance and cost of hard drives that have the same vibration characteristics, SSD's win hands down.

After the last few years, I've found Seagate's drives to have crappy firmware (they tried fixing it with updates, but most of the time the updates did nothing), and then I started noticing WD drives failing.  WD Green drives aren't lasting into the 3 year lifespan like they should, and when the flooding in Thailand happened last year, WD cut their warranties down.  Now their drives are failing as bad as Seagate's did, but Seagate's seem to be more reliable now (ones that start with just ST<size>, not ST3<size>).  So in my experience with many different systems, I have to say that I'm no longer more confident in hard drives than I am in SSD's.  However, SSD's have the leg up on vibration resistance, since every SSD can sustain prolonged vibration.  Put a bunch of hard drives in a rack, however, and it's just something else to worry about.

We've been putting in a RAID 1 for the boot drive or the parent in a Hyper-V setup, and then a RAID 10 for the child VMs and/or data.  The performance is fantastic and we're as protected for drive failures as we  are with our other clients.

> I am not at the point of trusting consumer grade SSDs...

Update: I have been testing a consumer grade SSD in my desktop system. It died today. Not even 7 months. Of course I had a backup, but no way am I putting these in a server for a boot device!

Yeha lets all put ssd in servers. Very silly idea. I would not do it, I do also like raid ten, also raid five with 6 - 8 HDD's in it and a hot spare. This gives you optimal read speed heresjaken.com/installing-my-new-ssd Installing ssd in normal system is a good idea though you should give it a try