Results 1 to 25 of 42
Thread: SSD Drives
-
10-05-2009, 08:25 PM #1Web Hosting Guru
- Join Date
- Jan 2002
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 330
SSD Drives
Has anyone begun implementing SSD drives? We're thinking about using them as OS drives. Any thoughts?
-
10-05-2009, 09:26 PM #2Disabled
- Join Date
- Jul 2009
- Posts
- 368
No, not yet. I prefer to wait a little more...
Flash-memory cells have limited lifetimes and will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles.
As a result of wear leveling and write combining, the performance of SSDs degrades with use. Not to mention space gets reduces over time. On a server, that means 24 hour reading and writting data, that means the life of a SSD is shorter in the datacenter.
More power than hard disks on the rack.
-
10-05-2009, 09:32 PM #3Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Mar 2009
- Posts
- 2,222
-
10-05-2009, 09:54 PM #4WHT Addict
- Join Date
- Feb 2006
- Location
- Milwaukee, WI
- Posts
- 172
We've seen some data centers start to offer SSD drives as an alternative however we performed some simple r/w testing using SSD's in a mySQL backend and didn't see great improvement over regular 15k drives.
█ Umbra Hosting
█ cPanel | Softaculous | CloudLinux | CloudFlare Optimized Partner
█ Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS, Dedicated Servers, Colocation
█ UmbraHosting.com
-
10-05-2009, 09:56 PM #5Web Hosting Guru
- Join Date
- Oct 2004
- Location
- Houston, Tx
- Posts
- 307
-
10-05-2009, 09:58 PM #6Retired Moderator
- Join Date
- May 2006
- Location
- San Francisco
- Posts
- 7,325
The new generation SSD controllers (Intel's G2, Indilinx Barefoot, etc.) are all superb and concerns about performance degradation and short lifespan are no longer real issues.
-
10-05-2009, 10:17 PM #7Junior Guru
- Join Date
- May 2007
- Location
- Dublin, California
- Posts
- 242
-
10-05-2009, 10:18 PM #8Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Nov 2007
- Location
- Dallas, TX
- Posts
- 9,064
-
10-06-2009, 12:57 AM #9Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Apr 2005
- Posts
- 1,111
We've put SSD in Sun4150 - about 3 times faster then 15K drives (RAIDED) - unbelievable speed during booting up the system.
Drives is small 32GB - about 6 month ago paid like $100+ for each.Professional Streaming services - http://www.tulix.com - info at tulix.com
Double optimized - AS36820) network, best for live streaming/VoIP/gaming
The best quality network - AS7219
-
10-06-2009, 01:42 AM #10Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Dec 2007
- Posts
- 612
Drive space still isn't worth the price yet, but the speed and reliability looks great. Hopefully another year or two and the prices will become more reasonable
-
10-06-2009, 02:50 AM #11Managed Service Provider
- Join Date
- Feb 2004
- Location
- Atlanta, GA
- Posts
- 5,662
Reliability in your 'consumer' ie sub $200 disks has been very poor to say the least, we've tested drives from patriot, intel, kingston, etc, etc and what we're seeing is that within 4-6 months of use, a very high rate of failure. Significantly more (1 out of 3 SSD's deployed) failing as opposed to the relatively low failure rate of your classical HD's.
-
10-06-2009, 03:34 AM #12Disabled
- Join Date
- Jul 2009
- Posts
- 368
-
10-06-2009, 04:15 AM #13Junior Guru
- Join Date
- Oct 2007
- Posts
- 239
I have implemented high end SSD drives for demanding time sensitive applications, with great results. The access speed and throughput is amazing. (0.10ms, ~250MB/s)
I would not bother using it for normal web-hosting though. There's no sense in it from a cost/benefit perspective at this point. The majority of the load will be on the disks holding your client files/data, and for that quantity will matter. For the price of one good 60-80GB SSD you can for an example get 4 x 1TB S-ATA drives. In RAID10 these will have sufficient performance for typical web serving, and provide redundancy at the same time. If you for some reason need better performance, SAS is still cheaper per GB if you need high capacity.
-
10-06-2009, 04:50 AM #14THE Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Jan 2003
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Posts
- 6,957
I agree, do NOT use the standard consumer grade SSD's in a server, we've had some customers having bad luck with those... We've had great luck with the Intel SSD drives though, not a single failure of any kind and amazing speeds. I'd say on MySQL speeds are easily 10x that of a standard 15k RPM SAS drive, if not greater. All SSD's are NOT created the same, the performance and reliability difference are VAST, so no comments are really valid for all SSD drives, just like most of my comments and experience refer specifically to the Enterprise Intel drives.
The key with SSD's is finding the right use, where there are a lot of random reads and writes without needing a ton of space. If you're looking at just sequential reads, etc. it likely isn't worth it. For us, database servers have been a great use, or even for offloading journaling, etc. on busy arrays.Karl Zimmerman - Founder & CEO of Steadfast
VMware Virtual Data Center Platform
karl @ steadfast.net - Sales/Support: 312-602-2689
Cloud Hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Chicago Colocation, and New Jersey Colocation
-
10-06-2009, 07:36 AM #15Web Hosting Guru
- Join Date
- Aug 2005
- Location
- PA
- Posts
- 324
I have tested SSD drives for use with Solaris ZFS, where you use the SSD to cache the writes.
In such cases performance is excellent; I got near wire speed over gigabit with NFS writes, like 90MB/s.
The reason is that when using NFS with VMware, VMware calls a COMMIT on each small transaction, which Solaris NFS then flushes its disk cache; this results in slow but correct operation. But when you commit to the cache disk it is still considered a flush, thus it completes immediately and performance goes way up.
As soon as someone figures out how to have Linux or FreeBSD use 1 SSD (or 2 SSDs mirrored) to get similar performance jumps you will see them everywhere.reliable colocation ... Dedicated Servers | Dedicated Server VMs | FAST links to Vitelity.com and Conexiant.net
patrick@zill.net Cell +1.717.201.3366
-
10-06-2009, 08:48 AM #16Aspiring Evangelist
- Join Date
- May 2005
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Posts
- 390
I've rolled out Intel SSD's (G1 and G2) to our desktops at work and their speed is amazing. Once you've used one you'll never go back, and the G2's are now only around £150 for 80GB.
On the server side though, I haven't seen any need for them yet. Why would you use them for the OS partition? (unless you had to reboot frequently )
Heavy database use would benefit hugely from SSDs but for the moment the price/performance isn't great compared to hard disks (when used for other tasks).
The Intel SSDs are tested to read/write hundreds of gigabytes a day over their lifetime and so are one of the most reliable SSDs you can get.Last edited by jpwjpw; 10-06-2009 at 08:51 AM.
-
10-06-2009, 09:59 AM #17******* Unleaded
- Join Date
- Feb 2004
- Posts
- 3,849
edgedirector.com
managed dns global failover and load balance (gslb)
exactstate.com
uptime report for webhostingtalk.com
-
10-06-2009, 10:14 AM #18Web Hosting Guru
- Join Date
- Jan 2002
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 330
Thanks for all the info guys! I would use the SSD for the OS drive only.. still trying to decide between SSD and a VelociRaptor. From my basic research, it looks like the lower-end SSD's are still not doing that well. I don't need a lot of HD space since it's just for the OS, but I def. do need it to be reliable and can't really afford to buy the high end SSD's.
-
10-06-2009, 10:19 AM #19Backup Guru
- Join Date
- Feb 2002
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 4,618
Scott Burns, President
BQ Internet Corporation
Remote Rsync and FTP backup solutions
*** http://www.bqbackup.com/ ***
-
10-06-2009, 10:56 AM #20Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Mar 2009
- Posts
- 2,222
Sorry, I failed to be clear.
OVH offer two configurations at the same price ...
One configuration is Xeon quad-core, 1gbps network, 10TB traffic, 12GB RAM, and 2x80GB Intel SSDs.
The other configuration is Xeon quad-core, 1gbps network, 10TB traffic, 8GB RAM, and 2x750GB SATA HDDs.
The price in the UK is £70+VAT per month, which is about $140.
It's interesting that they charge the same price despite SSDs costing more; but over the lifetime of the server, they presumably save enough electricity using SSDs that they come out ahead.
I see IBM is now offering SSDs in its DS8000 SAN system:
ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/storag.../DS8000SSD.pdf
-
10-06-2009, 11:34 AM #21Aspiring Evangelist
- Join Date
- May 2005
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Posts
- 390
-
10-06-2009, 11:53 AM #22Web Hosting Guru
- Join Date
- Jan 2002
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 330
-
10-06-2009, 12:31 PM #23Aspiring Evangelist
- Join Date
- May 2005
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Posts
- 390
-
10-06-2009, 12:36 PM #24Registered User
- Join Date
- Aug 2004
- Location
- ring0
- Posts
- 110
Stick with SLC based drives for servers. The MLC drives have too short of a lifespan with the limited number of writes they can handle. It's possible to burn up a 80GB MLC drive in 2 months.
-
10-06-2009, 12:40 PM #25Boneless Wing Analyst
- Join Date
- Nov 2007
- Location
- the hot aisle
- Posts
- 618
Consider RAIDing 2x 7200 RPM drives instead. The price to space ratio is far better and the I/O speeds are alarmingly similar.
Michael G ★ Sharktech - DDOS Protected Servers ★ 20 years in business
Bare Metal Dedicated Servers ★ Public and Private Cloud ★ Colocation ★ VPS ★ DDOS Protection ★ IP Transit
Amsterdam ★ Chicago ★ Denver ★ Los Angeles
Similar Threads
-
Dell drives in a RAID array with non-Dell drives?
By Qgyen in forum Colocation, Data Centers, IP Space and NetworksReplies: 1Last Post: 09-14-2009, 04:05 PM -
SAS drives
By DDT in forum Infrastructure & Hosting Company DiscussionsReplies: 11Last Post: 02-05-2008, 08:57 PM -
Adding Drives or Replacing with Larger Drives, Possible?
By rracer99 in forum Hosting Security and TechnologyReplies: 11Last Post: 08-12-2004, 06:50 PM -
DAT Drives
By richardparry in forum Hosting Security and TechnologyReplies: 1Last Post: 04-03-2002, 02:19 AM