Solid State Drives on servers - advisable?

[OverWorked]

Seeing as how solid state drives are getting really affordable, is anyone putting them in servers?

 

I'm looking to buy SATA drives for a server to use as a Server 2008 DC.

 

Are solid state drives reliable and fast enough? Would I still need RAID? (not needing RAID would make it worthwhile as they're twice the price). I'd have two DCs so would still have redundancy there.

 

Is anyone actually doing this?

 

Thanks.

[Guest Guest]

Personally id say you'll be alright. Money no object you'd have to go for the intel x25-E. If money is tight the x25-m g2 might be worth a go but do look into the problems intel have had with TRIM and a recent firmware they released. It bricked many drives running Win7 (the only desktop MS OS which impliments TRIM)

[gshaw]

I heard that VMWare are using them in some top-end builds for primary storage due to the access speeds but money wise it's still pricey so unless you're feeling flush might have to wait a while longer for it to go mainstream... the future looks good though

[OverWorked]

I was thinking more of the low-end, like the Kingston V-Series, but looking at the quoted read/write speeds they don't look too great compared with SATA-II HDDs. I may stick with disks for now. On the other hand, a DC with plenty of RAM shouldn't be accessing the disk much anyway, so the drive performance won't make much difference.

 

I've just got two servers without drives from from ICT-Direct, and was looking at drives for them when I noticed the low cost of some SSDs.

[Guest Guest]

I was thinking more of the low-end, like the Kingston V-Series, but looking at the quoted read/write speeds they don't look too great compared with SATA-II HDDs. I may stick with disks for now. On the other hand, a DC with plenty of RAM shouldn't be accessing the disk much anyway, so the drive performance won't make much difference.

 

I've just got two servers without drives from from ICT-Direct, and was looking at drives for them when I noticed the low cost of some SSDs.

 

Whatever you do DONT go for the el cheapo (or in some cases not so cheap) ones. The only ones to go for are the Intels and the ones with the chip with a name beginning with V which i cant for remember atm! lol

The intel x25-m G2s are actually quite cheap really anyway, but finding them is like rockin horse...

Theres a link on this forum to a very useful and fairly indepth guide to why not all SSDs are built equal.

[Duke]

We're running SSDs as Flash Accelerators in our Sun S7410 storage box and they're brilliant. As far as I can see you would still need RAID for redundancy, although the optimal RAID type and configuration may differ between hard disks and SSDs.

 

Do you really need this kind of disk bandwidth on a DC though? I wouldn't have thought there would have been much disk bottleneck on a DC just using 15K SAS drives in RAID 10, which is presumably still cheaper than SSDs?

 

I'd save the SSDs for your Exchange and SQL boxes.

 

Chris

[OverWorked]

Whatever you do DONT go for the el cheapo (or in some cases not so cheap) ones. The only ones to go for are the Intels and the ones with the chip with a name beginning with V which i cant for remember atm! lol

The intel x25-m G2s are actually quite cheap really anyway, but finding them is like rockin horse...

Theres a link on this forum to a very useful and fairly indepth guide to why not all SSDs are built equal.

 

The Kingston M-Series are Intel x25-m, but you're right, I can't find any with my usual suppliers.

 

Leave it. I'll stick with disks. Thanks eveyone.

[Guest Guest]

The Kingston M-Series are Intel x25-m, but you're right, I can't find any with my usual suppliers.

 

Leave it. I'll stick with disks. Thanks eveyone.

 

They have to be the g2 version. The first version suffers from the slow down problem.

[teejay]

SATA drives are fine for DC's, spend the extra money on more RAM and an extended runtime UPS