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SSDs: The New King of the Data Center?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Flash storage is more common on mobile devices than data-center hardware, but that could soon change. The industry has seen increasing sales of solid-state drives (SSDs) as a replacement for traditional hard drives, according to IHS iSuppli Research. Nearly all of these have been sold for ultrabooks, laptops and other mobile devices that can benefit from a combination of low energy use and high-powered performance. Despite that, businesses have lagged the consumer market in adoption of SSDs, largely due to the format's comparatively small size, high cost and the concerns of datacenter managers about long-term stability and comparatively high failure rates. But that's changing quickly, according to market researchers IDC and Gartner: Datacenter- and enterprise-storage managers are buying SSDs in greater numbers for both server-attached storage and mainstream storage infrastructure, according to studies both research firms published in April. That doesn't mean SSDs will oust hard drives and replace them directly in existing systems, but it does raise a question: are SSDs mature enough (and cheap enough) to support business-sized workloads? Or are they still best suited for laptops and mobile devices?"
The question is really going to be what kind of shape the drives will be in a year or so from now after 12+ months of constant heavy usage. The usage profile in consumer computers is a lot different from that in a server, and the server workload's going to stress more of the weakest areas of SSDs. And when it comes to manufacturer or lab test results, simple rule: "The absolute worst-case conditions achievable in the lab won't begin to approximate normal operating conditions in the field.". So, while SSDs are definitely worth looking at, I'll let someone else to do the 24-36 month real-workload stress testing on them. There's a reason they call it the bleeding edge after all.
TRIM isn't necessary if the SSD uses spare sectors to keep the write amplification low. You can also partition the SSD to have a swath of unused space for that purpose.
By switching to SSD's on a data intensive web application, I got 20 times speed improvement - from 20 hits per second to 400. I trust SSDs more than physical spindles any day.
When designing storage for any Business or Enterprise the disks (solid state or spinning) should always be in some sort of RAID configuration that supports disk redundancy. Failure to do this could result in loss of data when the disk eventually fails and it will. I am often asked "How long" and my answer is "How long is a peace of string".
At the moment SSD's are excellent when you need high I/O from a few disks up to say a few TB however if you look at enterprise storage solutions of 10's or even 1000's of TBytes you are still looking at spinning media with large cache front ends (BTW I am talking about $20k up to many millions of dollars storage area networks). Of course for smaller scale computing SSD's are excellent for high performance but unless you don't really care about your data you still need disk redundancy or I hope your backup and recovery services are excellent, keeping in mind that an outage may cost a considerable amount of money for every hour or even minute you are down.
It must be noted that when designing any computing system you really need to consider performance expectations as well as backup and recovery requirements. The choice of using SSD's, spinning media or even SAN's is normally made after Business or Enterprise expectations are made clear.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Up to 2.5 times faster
Ah, "up to." Marketing's best friend.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
and my answer is "How long is a piece of string".
Sorry, that phrase always strikes a nerve with me. More useful answers would include an average, or even better, a graph detailing the death rate of SSDs (and how they tend to die early if they do die, but tend to last if they get past that initial phase).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
That requires explaining the poisson distribution to a pointy-haired boss.
write wear is a read herring. Unless you are over-writing the entire drive multiple times a day, you'll last longer with an SSD than spinning disk. And even then, the current generation will last longer than the early ones, and early ones are lasting longer than predicted.
Learn to love Alaska
The length of a piece of string is twice the distance from the center to an end.