August 15, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Going Big with SSDs
August 16, 2011 at 3:24 am
I really want an SSD for personal use. I've seen demos for booting up computers where slower computers with SSD's boot 45 seconds faster then a faster computer with a regular hard drive.
Regarding the reliability, I do know that there is a limit to the number of writes you can perform so these drives move data around to prevent any specific memory location from being overwritten too many times and being locked out. Otherwise, I haven't heard of anyone reporting crashes.
For some reason, when you buy a Mac Pro, it specifically states that you cannot use SSD's with the raid controller. That's unfortunate and I wonder why. Perhaps Raid in Striped mode will not improve performance anyway but what if I want to mirror the data for redundancy? Or, JBOD them so I can have a larger partition to store all my tools in one location.
August 16, 2011 at 4:13 am
I've heard a few things about SSD's, limited number of writes for memory's lifetime, fast reads and slow writes, but this probably depends on how the memory is wired up inside the SSD. There are still a lot performance gains that can be had with a large standard memory cache on the input/output of a standard drives. I'm sure though that in a few years time the hard disk will be the equivalent of the video recorder and 35mm camera.
August 16, 2011 at 6:03 am
A few months ago I installed 4x 64GB SSD in a RAID 0 configuration using the SATA-controller on my motherboard in my home PC. I can tell you: it FLIES. At home I'm less concerned with reliability (so far not a single hick-up). The main reasons for choosing SSD: silence (it is my Home Theater PC and only 2m away from the couch), more energy-efficient and improving response-times of Windows 7.
The limit on the number of writes means that in 5 years or so the disks will be at their end of their life. Well... I've never had a PC for more than 3 years in active use at home or business, so......
For business use I agree with Steve, only deploy them where you really need the extra performance and plan for redundancy/reliability (hardware RAID 5 at a minimum I'd say).
August 16, 2011 at 7:19 am
mar10br0 (8/16/2011)
A few months ago I installed 4x 64GB SSD in a RAID 0 configuration using the SATA-controller on my motherboard in my home PC. I can tell you: it FLIES. At home I'm less concerned with reliability (so far not a single hick-up). The main reasons for choosing SSD: silence (it is my Home Theater PC and only 2m away from the couch), more energy-efficient and improving response-times of Windows 7.The limit on the number of writes means that in 5 years or so the disks will be at their end of their life. Well... I've never had a PC for more than 3 years in active use at home or business, so......
For business use I agree with Steve, only deploy them where you really need the extra performance and plan for redundancy/reliability (hardware RAID 5 at a minimum I'd say).
How much did the 4 64GB cost? Also, it is hiccup or hiccough, not "hick-up".
August 16, 2011 at 7:25 am
I hate to nitpick but I don't believe that many are using SSD's for their logfiles. The main performance advantage of an SSD is IOPS. 15k RPM drives aren't much worse than SSDs for sequential reads and writes, and they tend to be much cheaper per GB. When addressing Cost/Benefit of using SSDs for logfiles, it just doesn't make much sense.
August 16, 2011 at 9:26 am
clubbavich (8/16/2011)
I hate to nitpick but I don't believe that many are using SSD's for their logfiles. The main performance advantage of an SSD is IOPS. 15k RPM drives aren't much worse than SSDs for sequential reads and writes, and they tend to be much cheaper per GB. When addressing Cost/Benefit of using SSDs for logfiles, it just doesn't make much sense.
Yes, the main performance advantage is in random IO (particularly at small sizes, like 8KB), but that's only because 15k drives have such horrific performance for that workload. SSD's also have a performance advantage in sequential IO. You can have one tenth the number of SSDs as 15k disks, and see five times the performance, for 8KB random reads at a high IO outstanding depth in particular. Other situations demonstrate smaller gains; those same 2 SSDs are probably equivalent to five times as many 15k disks for 256KB sequential reads.
That said, an advantage of SSD's is also a reduction of the performance penalty of putting both logs and data files on the same devices, since that effectively turns sequential IO into random IO, and a few SSD's can generally handle a higher random IO throughput than, say, a 4Gbps FC SAN could in the first place. TempDB's log file gets quite a bit of writes; keeping that tempdb log traffic off a SAN or your other disks can be valuable, if you've got the space.
Note that local SSDs for sequential access generally have a much higher throughput cap than the average SAN configuration, for a lower price (and with a much lower amount of space available).
Note also that you need to benchmark very carefully; some local controllers have serious throughput or IOPS caps that you'd rarely or never see on 15k disks, but which critically impede SSD's. Some local controllers have issues with certain operations or block sizes.
As an important note, with some SSD's on a local controller, at least, the performance difference between RAID5 and RAID10 depends more on random vs. sequential workloads, and less on reads vs. writes, contrary to conventional wisdom.
For SSD's, however, there remains an interesting question: If you have sensitive data on them, how do you sanitize it? On a spindle disk, there may be a few bad blocks that give problems, but a bulk degausser is a reasonable low-security solution (very high security solutions involve grinding platters into powder). For an SSD, the wear leveling means there are many more blocks it's difficult to write (or impossible if they're offline), and you can't degauss them, either; this leaves the same very high security solutions of total physical destruction, but impedes simple, cheap solutions like overwriting many times and degaussing.
August 16, 2011 at 9:44 am
I would really like a 1tb ssd for personal testing/use. I like the product that fusionIO is putting out - very fast and so far reliable. I also like the green effect from using SSDs.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
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August 16, 2011 at 10:05 am
cengland0 (8/16/2011)
I really want an SSD for personal use. I've seen demos for booting up computers where slower computers with SSD's boot 45 seconds faster then a faster computer with a regular hard drive.Regarding the reliability, I do know that there is a limit to the number of writes you can perform so these drives move data around to prevent any specific memory location from being overwritten too many times and being locked out. Otherwise, I haven't heard of anyone reporting crashes.
For some reason, when you buy a Mac Pro, it specifically states that you cannot use SSD's with the raid controller. That's unfortunate and I wonder why. Perhaps Raid in Striped mode will not improve performance anyway but what if I want to mirror the data for redundancy? Or, JBOD them so I can have a larger partition to store all my tools in one location.
I have an SSD but I rarely boot. I use it in the laptop as the 2nd drive for VMs. Not sure I see it as tremendously faster. Would definitely prefer it to be the primary drive.
In terms of reliability, there is writing to new sectors (write leveling), which has increased the lifetime, but NAND or other flash chips have a lower lifetime than spinning disks. I have heard of quite a few people burning out SSDs, though that was a couple years ago.
Jeff Atwood talked about failures in laptops here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
August 16, 2011 at 11:00 am
SQLRNNR (8/16/2011)
I would really like a 1tb ssd for personal testing/use. I like the product that fusionIO is putting out - very fast and so far reliable. I also like the green effect from using SSDs.
What is that 'green effect,' Jason? Less energy, quieter, ... ?
August 16, 2011 at 4:53 pm
nadabadan (8/16/2011)
mar10br0 (8/16/2011)
A few months ago I installed 4x 64GB SSD in a RAID 0 configuration using the SATA-controller on my motherboard in my home PC. I can tell you: it FLIES. At home I'm less concerned with reliability (so far not a single hick-up). The main reasons for choosing SSD: silence (it is my Home Theater PC and only 2m away from the couch), more energy-efficient and improving response-times of Windows 7.The limit on the number of writes means that in 5 years or so the disks will be at their end of their life. Well... I've never had a PC for more than 3 years in active use at home or business, so......
For business use I agree with Steve, only deploy them where you really need the extra performance and plan for redundancy/reliability (hardware RAID 5 at a minimum I'd say).
How much did the 4 64GB cost? Also, it is hiccup or hiccough, not "hick-up".
They are Crucial M4 64GB, I paid about AU$750 for the lot of 4.
And pardon my English, it's not my native language (Dutch) 😉
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