How many SSDs do you have?

[mavhc]

All SSDs except iMacs, can't be bothered to take them apart, only good for putting on desks on tv shows really, and one ultrabook. No SSDs in servers yet, have to sort out how best to do that, don't need enterprise level drives for storing user files.

 

Samsung 840s, 850 evo, and Dynamode SSD-RAIL 2.5 inch HDD or SDD Conversion Cradle for 3.5 inch Drive Bays: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories for 3.5 bays

 

Never bought computers with SSDs in, always seem overpriced compared to upgrading myself.

[Sheridan]

Mostly 120gb and lots of sticky pads here! The last 130 or so new PCs and laptops are all ssd based as well. A cheap i5 with ssd is a pretty quick machine!

[zag]

Nobody else running SSD's in servers yet?

 

Its awesome by the way, complete revolution in managing them once they are in.

[localzuk]

Nobody else running SSD's in servers yet?

 

Its awesome by the way, complete revolution in managing them once they are in.

 

I've got a bunch of enterprise 100GB ones in our servers (bought without my guidance). They host our RDS servers, SQL servers, and user profiles.

 

When these servers are up for renewal (gonna be a few years, as they were heavily over spec when they were bought), I'll be looking at 100% SSD for storage. We don't have enough data to justify sticking with HDDs any more.

[Oaktech]

Nobody else running SSD's in servers yet?

 

Its awesome by the way, complete revolution in managing them once they are in.

 

I'm running 120gb intel ssds as boot drives in my 3 microservers. $Deity knows they need all the help they get.

[3s-gtech]

I have a couple of SSDs in my servers - two in RAID 1 for the storage for a RDS session host on Hyper-V, and four 512GB in RAID 0 for hosting Virtualbox VMs (which are throwaway so the madness of RAID 0 doesn't matter).

[ITGURU]

Nobody else running SSD's in servers yet?

 

Its awesome by the way, complete revolution in managing them once they are in.

 

 

None in servers. All 2.5" sas hard drives - client hardware is current bottleneck rather than server disk.

[zag]

None in servers. All 2.5" sas hard drives - client hardware is current bottleneck rather than server disk.

 

You sure about that? I found our old hard disks, especially on our file server were a huge bottleneck.

 

It was like opening the floodgates of speed on our network once we migrated. Copying files over the network is about 3 times faster now.

 

The next bottleneck up is the gigabit cabling I believe.

[ITGURU]

You sure about that? I found our old hard disks, especially on our file server were a huge bottleneck.

 

It was like opening the floodgates of speed on our network once we migrated. Copying files over the network is about 3 times faster now.

 

The next bottleneck up is the gigabit cabling I believe.

 

Yep, monitor disk activity / load and queue and are all fine. - KS3 and KS4 data separate physical servers, 10meg roaming profiles. 10gig backbone, 1 gig to each PC, vast difference logging on with a SSD PC than HDD.

 

Wouldn't see any benefit in SSD for servers currently.

[synaesthesia]

Let's face some facts, the benefits from going to a "silly cheap SSD" (we did the bulk of ours with Kingston V300;s this summer although many are Samsung 840), as has been said you can do double the amount and if one fails, it's no skin off anyone's budget. They're just workstations, there is no data being kept on them. I would wholeheartedly agree that you should buy decent if it's a standalone machine (home, office workstation) or for servers but that's where data matters..

[SchoolCloudSystems]

I have a couple of SSDs in my servers - two in RAID 1 for the storage for a RDS session host on Hyper-V, and four 512GB in RAID 0 for hosting Virtualbox VMs (which are throwaway so the madness of RAID 0 doesn't matter).

 

Hope you have a good RAID card to handle the speeds of the RAID 0 array! We had to get quite beefy RAID cards for the servers hosting our web applications and in the process found some drives just aren't up to the task in servers due to their garbage collection algorithms (TRIM commands aren't passed through).

[localzuk]

For a cheap solution for server SSDs, I'd not use RAID - I'd use Windows Storage Spaces, and have the disks just mounted as normal disks instead. So, basically, software RAID.

 

Sure, you'll lose some performance (although this seems to be a lot better nowadays), but cost vs benefit outcome is pretty darn good. Plus, you're not tied to a specific make/model of RAID card etc...

[zag]

RAID is completely redundant(excuse the pun) if you are buying decent SSD's

 

Its old technology that is not relevant to today's storage needs.

[Tesla]

I try to buy anything with SSD's in now from the lovely @ICTDirect_Dave

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I try to buy anything with SSD's in now from the lovely @ICTDirect_Dave

 

Lovely eh?!

 

Give that man a discount!

[3s-gtech]

They're not in RAID 1 for mirroring, but RAID 0 for striping. The controller is an old P400, and doesn't support JBOD. Formatting the drives as such within Windows to be a JBOD was going to take days. Basically, I just wanted a big fast single partition. Reliability not an issue. And yes, I'm well aware that the RAID controller is nowhere near up to running this lot well - it's only SATA2 for SATA interfaces anyway It's all just an experiment for our low cost VirtualBox farm.

 

On topic: playing about with SSDs in servers is fun.

 

Edit: Erk. Time to update the controller firmware! Benchmark results are not pretty at all!

Edited September 15, 2015 by 3s-gtech

[Arthur]

I found our old hard disks, especially on our file server were a huge bottleneck.

Did you have a lot of users accessing the file server?

 

As the number of users increases the CPU usage and average disk queue lengths increase quite a bit if your servers have HDDs.

 

http://vgy.me/qd8bjw.png

 

http://vgy.me/blkqZp.png

 

Sources: stealthpuppy.com/synergy-2015-replay / mycugc.org/p/do/sd/sid=25

[sonofsanta]

Server SSDs are great in theory, horrible in oh-my-god-have-you-seen-what-HP-charge practice.

 

Not coincidentally, I'll be seriously considering other options alongside HP this Summer when the servers are refreshed...

 

Our file servers (what we build in house) have had their OS on SSD for a while now though, and the user roaming profiles.

[zag]

Server SSDs are great in theory, horrible in oh-my-god-have-you-seen-what-HP-charge practice.

 

Yeh HP (and Dell) charge a ridiculous amount for SSD's. I have no idea why or how they justify it. The drives they provide are not even that good sometimes.

 

We buy after-market Intel SSD's and a spare one as well, the servers have hot swappable disk bays so its as easy as popping it out and putting another one in if it fails. Not that its ever failed though

[DGardiner]

I'm about to order my first batch of 10 evo 850s - and have never used them in a domain environment - is the performance gain as significant as stand alone? (since a lot of stuff is stored on the network etc)

 

just not wanting to get my hopes up too much

[CyberNerd]

Server SSDs are great in theory, horrible in oh-my-god-have-you-seen-what-HP-charge practice.

 

 

 

Take a look at Easytier from IBM (I'm sure other manufacturers do similar). It will, non-disruptively and dynamically, move frequently accessed data to the SSD's so you can use slower drives and not need to put SSD in the entire system.

[rrrrr]

Server SSDs are great in theory, horrible in oh-my-god-have-you-seen-what-HP-charge practice.

 

Not coincidentally, I'll be seriously considering other options alongside HP this Summer when the servers are refreshed...

 

Our file servers (what we build in house) have had their OS on SSD for a while now though, and the user roaming profiles.

 

We have hp solid states in our servers, came with them already installed.

Server solid states would be tested for 24/7 operation and prob have a higher read/write before failure.

 

We use the ssds in raid 10 for server os and to host any database servers (sims, exchange, vle, etc) we also have a standard hdd array for file servers,

 

Very fast, sims backups of a 11gb database take under 20secs. Always get questioned what is our server spec by our sims support provider as they cant believe the speed and think it has not done it properly [emoji108]

[Arthur]

It will, non-disruptively and dynamically, move frequently accessed data to the SSD's so you can use slower drives and not need to put SSD in the entire system.

Windows Server 2012 R2 / 2016 can do that too.

[CyberNerd]

Windows Server 2012 R2 / 2016 can do that too.

 

The SAN software does it at a much lower level, so you can run VMWare et al. over the top.

[Danp]

Just about every machine has one and we are adding them to servers now as well. Our main shared area is on an SSD setup, works rather well!