On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Lists <lists@benjamindsmith.com> wrote:
> On 04/02/2014 02:55 PM, Bret Stern wrote:
>>
>> Care to share the SSD hardware you're using?
>>
>> I've used none to date, and have some critical data I would like
>> to put on a development server to test with.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Bret Stern
>
>
> SSDs are ridiculously cheap when you consider the performance difference. We
> saw at *least* a 10x improvement in performance going with SATA SSDs vs. 10k
> SAS drives in a messy, read/write environment. (most of our tests were 20x
> or more) It's a no-brainer for us.
>
> It might be tempting to use a consumer-grade SSD due to the significant cost
> savings, but the money saved is vapor. They may be OK for a dev environment,
> but you *will* pay in downtime in a production environment. Unlike regular
> hard drives where the difference between consumer and enterprise drives is
> performance and a few features, SSDs are different animals.
>
> SSDs wear something like a salt-shaker. There's a fairly definite number of
> writes that they are good for, and when they are gone, the drive will fail.
> Like a salt shaker, when the salt is gone, you won't get salt any more no
> matter how you shake it.
The real danger with consumer drives is they don't have supercaps and
can and will therefore corrupt your data on power failure. The actual
write cycles aren't a big deal for many uses, as now even consumer
drives have very long write cycle lives.