MS Researchers Call Moving Server Storage To SSDs a Bad Idea

An anonymous reader writes "As an IT administrator did you ever think of replacing disks by SSDs? Or using SSDs as an intermediate caching layer? A recent paper by Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads. The conclusion is that, for a range of typical enterprise workloads, using SSDs makes no sense in the short to medium future. Their price needs to decrease by 3-3000 times for them to make sense. Note that this paper has nothing to do with laptop workloads, for which SSDs probably make more sense (due to SSDs' ruggedness)."

Comments

Re:Not every tool is right for every application?!

[billcopc]

I love that term "Enterprise storage".

A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. It doesn't matter whether you pay $79 or $799 for a drive, it is just as likely to crash, burn and lose all your data as any other. The sole difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives lies in the firmware. It might have more aggressive queue deadlines, or be configured to "fail" as soon as a single defect is identified (even though it can remap them with spare sectors). In many cases they are 100% identical.

It's all just markup, and in some rare cases you might get an extra year or two on the warranty. I'd much rather buy ten cheap drives and have a bunch of spares, than buy the "enterprise" model and have it die just as catastrophically.

There's no shortage of FUD threatening that if you use a cheap drive in a server, your wife will cheat on you with a Seagate engineer, your first-born child with "go gay", coworkers will laugh at you and call you "Cheapy McCheaperson" behind your back, and Larry Ellison will reach down from his bearded throne and slap you across the face with a greased-up midget.

If an enterprise SSD comes with an enterprise-class warranty that justifies the cost, great! If not then you're a sucker for buying it, as the vendor laughs all the way to the bank.