SSD vs HDD For A Servers Primary Boot Drive

[SYSMAN_MK]

Currently speccing up 2 HP ML 110s for a Primary school. Plan on having one RAID Mirror for the OS and one another for data. Now an extra 250GB HP drive for the boot volume is around £100.00 which is the price of a 60GB OCZ Vertex 3. So would you just get the standard HDD for £100.00 or spend the extra on 2 SSDs?

Cheers

[sonofsanta]

The price gouging on HP hard drives is borderline criminal...

In all honesty, though, how often will that server be accessing random files from that array? It probably won't be a significant upgrade, so go with the cheapest, and only opt for SSDs if its the same cost. My tuppence, anywho.

[jamesfed]

To be honist unless they are running some kind of high read/write application on the servers (like SIMS/SQL) then the SSD would just be a waste of money.
We've got a ML110 in our Primary School with 2x1TB SATA drives and we haven't been able to max them out in anything that they use (even imaging 20 machines at once didn't tax the drives much).

If you want maybe get the P212 RAID controler and with the 256Mb of cache for a little bit of a boost but other than that a SSD is overkill.

[ZeroHour]

For the OS drive tbh I wouldnt go SSD, it wont make much diff and the money is better spent on RAM tbh.

[john]

For the OS drive tbh I wouldnt go SSD, it wont make much diff and the money is better spent on RAM tbh.

Completely agree with that one How about a compromise, I have a set of WD Raptor drives in one Primary Server for the OS to give ita bit of a boost without being criminal maybe worth looking at?

[ZeroHour]

Completely agree with that one How about a compromise, I have a set of WD Raptor drives in one Primary Server for the OS to give ita bit of a boost without being criminal maybe worth looking at?

Raptors are mega expensive btw, samsung do some good fast drives though for sane prices.

[nephilim]

I personally would buy some standard SAS HDDs for the OS and normal SATA hdds for the server data etc and additional RAM for the server.

[john]

Raptors are mega expensive btw, samsung do some good fast drives though for sane prices.

I've never found them to be that expensive for the space v performance. Although your are right in reviews some Samsung have caught up but most of my paperweights at work are Samsung drives....

[SYNACK]

It's a server reliability over speed and SSDs have a nasty habbit of killing themselves quickly, irreversably and without warning, RAID1 may help but I still wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it and HPs are heavy.

[synaesthesia]

I'm not so sure, £35 will get you an intel 30gb unit which will be absolutely more than enough for a server OS drive. As for killing themselves quickly - unfortunately true with some brands but 1. backups! 2. backups! 3. the worst SSD's are far more reliable than anything with a Maxtor label on

Then again I have to wonder; would there be much point? Boot time - how often do you reboot the server? General OS performance - your boot drive will (I hope!) just be doing Windows tasks - just about most of what a server will (or should!) be doing won't be on your boot drive, like page files, AD/sysvol information etc.

Makes it a little pointless IMO.

On a correctly set up server I think I'd be happier with an SAS or enterprise grade SATA drive, ideally in RAID1 even if it's the onboard fakeraid as the boot drive, and investing in something decent for your work drives and high throughput data storage.

Excuse this post - it's more me thinking out loud. As a result, I'd happily shoot anyone that thinks performance on a server OS drive is needed; because unless I'm missing something, that means your server is set up wrong/badly

[SYNACK]

the worst SSD's are far more reliable than anything with a Maxtor label on

That's an unfair comparison, anything with a Maxtor label on it is not actually a hard drive, its a poorly labeled and marketed random number genterator.

[PeterW]

far more reliable than anything with a Maxtor label on

Hmm a drive with a maxtor label on it could be maxtor,seagate or quantum

[SYSMAN_MK]

Cheers for the views guys. Standard HDD it is.

So on that note any recommendations on a RIAD contoller that would be an improvment over the MLs onboard, but still in keeping with the MLs pricing

[SYNACK]

Cheers for the views guys. Standard HDD it is.

So on that note any recommendations on a RIAD contoller that would be an improvment over the MLs onboard, but still in keeping with the MLs pricing

TBH to get a real improvement in speed and importantly reliability you are probably better off looking at a slightly higher spec base server with an integrated solution. Most of the controllers that are around the lower pricepoint will give you slightly better performance than the onboard but reliability wise leave everything to be desired.

[Cools]

HP E200 Raid controler with 256mb is a wast of time with sata drives.. it runs at 1.5gb/s a sec with sas you get 3gb/s
and there so slow.. i would get a PCIE card 4 port that will take SATA3 and get some drives SSD is over kill unless your vm-ing.