[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

I don't trust flash, so I am being cautious, but...

I am in the process of replacing my old (and I mean old) basement server 
with a new one. I have the base box mostly set up and am moving on to 
the mail VM.

Anyway, I bought a little mSATA 60GB card, and so far I am glad I did:

  - I can boot. The Ubuntu installer didn't understand the larger block 
size on the external 4TB drives I bought, so who knows how hard it would 
have been to make them bootable. I installed onto the SSD and added RAID 
1 external storage later. I have / on the SSD, but not /var nor /home, 
and certainly no swap.

  - It is fast. Compared to my previous toys, his new computer is damn 
fast in general, but the SSD is also marvelously fast.

Worries:

  - Flash can die with no warning and no recourse. I will be making a 
copy of the flash and keeping it on another medium. Maybe this board can 
boot from the SD slot it has? Maybe I just use a slow USB stick.

  - Flash hates writes. It can do some writing quickly, but be stingy 
with it. I plan on not writing to this device much. I don't think I have 
any hot files on it.

  - Flash hates getting full. I have a 25GB partition for the OS, which 
I think I can keep mostly empty. I have a second a complete copy in a 
second partition I can revert to if I break something. And the little 
extra is sitting mostly blank. I think wear-leveling happens across the 
whole device, all of the sectors I can refrain writing to are a benefit.

-kb