Solid State Hard Drives

[Busybub]

Anybody have any experience with these?

I am considering rebuilding one of our servers using a pair of solid state laptop drives, and possibly introducing one as a swap drive on another.

Other than the obvious issues regarding the connections, I was wondering if anybody had any other comments on general reliability and performance.

Is it worth doing?

[plexer]

Why bother when for the cost you can have much bigger traditional drives.

Solid state is a good idea for a laptop because if it's dropped it doesn't matter but I see no benifits for a server.

Ben

[Geoff]

Flash based SSDs have the following advantages that are relevant to servers when compared to conventional hard drives.

• faster startup (no spin up required)
• Faster read times (roughly double that of conventional hard drives)
• lower latency (seek times)
• lower power consumption and heat production (because there's no mechanical parts)

[ajbritton]

Are solid state HDs based on flash memory? I though flash memory had a relatively low maximum number of read/write cycles before it melted and was therefore little to no use for running Windows type operating systems from.

[Geoff]

Are solid state HDs based on flash memory?

Most are, some are DRAM based though.

I though flash memory had a relatively low maximum number of read/write cycles before it melted

2 - 3 years of operation vs 10+ years of traditional hard drives. According to manufacturers figures.

[Busybub]

It is the performance I am predominantly interested in, as specified by Geoff. It's a matter of whether the difference over a conventional drive array is worth the trouble and expense.

AJB, the suckers I'm referring to either use regular computer memory with battery backup or some derivative based on the same technology. The problem is that a 4gb mirror will cost upwards of 225 quid (400+ for 8gb)which is expensive (considering the limits for storage) unless it is noticably quicker.

[MonkeH]

Solid state is more usefull for extreme field conditions than performance, and they shouldn't be used for applications where a lot of swapping is required as they have a limited life on writes. If you want performance, look at a SAN/virtualisation solution.

[Busybub]

Found some more info on these things.

Apparently the Super Talent laptop jobbies are slow as you like so thery're out of the running, and the Gigabyte one which uses conventional memory chips only works with certain chipsets, so I'm out of luck.

Looks like it will be bog standard RAID stuff...

[bazuk]

hi all

i know this is an extreme example but texas instruments make a solid state drive system called ramsys for enterprise systems and data centers.

solid state all the same

baz