"enterprise" drives

[Dan Ritter]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 09:50:25PM -0400, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> Scott R. Ehrlich wrote:
> > 
> > Despite capacity, what are people's thoughts on the newer solid state 
> > drives?
> 
> I like the lack of moving parts for mobile use, but I'm concerned about 
> the limited number of write cycles; I don't think they would work well 
> for most server applications. (They might be okay for a read-mostly 
> server, as web servers often are.) You have to turn off most logging or 
> do logging to something other than flash (RAM disk with battery backup, 
> say) and disable utime on the file systems, or else you will wear out a 
> solid state drive VERY quickly.

On the one hand, Intel claims that their smart wear-levelling
system will extend the native 10,000 cycle lifetime to "5 years
at 100GB written per day" for their 80GB SSD.

On the other hand, I haven't spec'd them for indexing disks on
my database servers, even though the performance boost should be
pretty amazing... maybe two more Moore's Law cycles and they'll
be worth the risk.

-dsr-

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