New Server - SSD's?

[Billy Welsh]

We are looking ahead to next year and the possibility of replacing the server hardware.

Is is time to consider SSD's for this?  I don't plan on buying any PC's that Don't have them.  But I don't know if they are making their way into servers yet.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Yes they are, but I'm not sure that you would want to use them for everything on your server.  There's an article about the reliability of SSD drives, how they're being used, and the failure rate.  There's not a lot of data out there on SSD reliability but this seems to be an interesting article.  They made a comment about the reliability of drives in a RAID array that I thought was interesting, relating to the likelihood of another drive failing within hours of the first drive failing.  I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was kind of frightening.  It also said that Intel was the most reliable, and OCZ the least I believe, with quite high failure rates. 

I think it's either this article or another linked article that talks about how server hosting companies are using SSD drives for caching and the like.  I don't think you'd have the same needs, but the article was interesting.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

We are now running a hybrid SAN with both SAS and SSD... that said, in the first week an SSD failed.

[Jeff Zylstra]

We are now running a hybrid SAN with both SAS and SSD... that said, in the first week an SSD failed.

They can say anything they want about bulletproof reliability, but when YOUR drive fails, they're all a bunch of junk in your mind!   

One of the comments in the article was that SSDs fail electronically, whereas spinning drives more likely have mechanical failures. They went on to say that this affects your chances of recovering data and that mechanical failures might be more forgiving. 

One of the interesting things I learned through my latest drive crash is that Spinrite 6.0 is still the most current version (it's 10 years old), and still works on every kind of drive.  It might be worthwhile to burn in mission critical drives and have them fail before they go into production, if it's possible.

There was also some other mods to the OS that they would like you to do on SSDs, as well as keeping on the latest firmware for the drives, as that greatly affects reliability and speed.  I'm sure you're more than aware of this, but I thought I would mention it.