[Discuss] SSD

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

On Thu, 2012-05-31 at 11:09 -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On 5/31/2012 10:57 AM, Richard McCluskey wrote:
> > If I had a desktop I would put them in there too.  I you need fast
> > disk I/O then it is totally worth it in my opinion.
> 
> That's the kicker: do you really need that performance?
> Tangentially: is it worth the premium and the much shorter life?
> 
> Typically, more RAM is a better investment than replacing the system 
> drive with flash.  If you do go the SSD route then more RAM is going to 
> mean less paging which means longer life for the SSD.  Either way, more 
> RAM is the first step.
> 

Thank you for this great thread on SSDs. My workstation currently has 24
Gigs of memory so I think I'm OK on the RAM side. The plan is to get
several of these SSDs and use them for my virtual systems. I typically
run three at a time. What ends up happening is as I run my virtual
system, I can hear the disk heads thrashing about, especially with the
windows virtual system. So I figure I can load the OS and apps on the
SSDs and I should get my improvement. (Maybe I'll utube my upgrade...)

It sounds like the SSD technology is mature enough that this upgrade
path makes some sense. The bit I'm worried about is disk crashes with
the SSDs not working due to what ever with the memory system of the
drives. (I take it they run parity memory?) Does it make sense to have a
raid setup for redundancy? Or just trust the drives will work fine? By
putting just the OS on the SSDs, the idea is that if there is a
catastrophic failure, all I loose is the time to reload and reconfigure
the OS. My home directory would still be on the old trusty magnetic
"analogue" disk drives which I run a raid system on.

Cheers. Steve.