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Thread: SSD Drives

  1. #1
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    SSD Drives

    Has anyone begun implementing SSD drives? We're thinking about using them as OS drives. Any thoughts?
    Alex Melen
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  2. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by amelen View Post
    Has anyone begun implementing SSD drives? We're thinking about using them as OS drives. Any thoughts?
    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.

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by amelen View Post
    Has anyone begun implementing SSD drives? We're thinking about using them as OS drives. Any thoughts?
    OVH have ... Xeon quad-core, 12GB RAM, 2x80GB Intel SSD, 10TB bandwidth at 1gbps, about $140 a month. (For the same price, you can have 8GB RAM and 2x750GB disks instead.)

  4. #4
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    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.
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  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by PYDOT View Post
    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.

    Modern SSD's have write cycles well into the millions. This means the SSD will last for much longer than a traditional hard drive.

  6. #6
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    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.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by tim2718281 View Post
    OVH have ... Xeon quad-core, 12GB RAM, 2x80GB Intel SSD, 10TB bandwidth at 1gbps, about $140 a month. (For the same price, you can have 8GB RAM and 2x750GB disks instead.)
    Where would you get a server with the same specs with 2x750 GB disks for that price?

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Orien View Post
    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.
    Nice! Thanks for the information, Orien.

    What is the pricing?

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  9. #9
    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.
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  10. #10
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    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

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by matthall28 View Post
    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
    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.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by WireSix View Post
    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.
    Does this confirm what I said before then?

    I also read someone here on WHT said he had a RAID 10 setup with 12 disks and it was outperforming SSDs...not sure if that is truth...

  13. #13
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    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.

  14. #14
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    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.
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  15. #15
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    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.
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  16. #16
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    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.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by MrZillNet View Post
    But when you commit to the cache disk it is still considered a flush, thus it completes immediately and performance goes way up.
    But, that's the same effect you get when using battery backed write cache on scsi raid cards in writeback mode.
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  18. #18
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    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.
    Alex Melen
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    Quote Originally Posted by MrZillNet View Post
    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.
    On FreeBSD, you can have gjournal keep the journal on a separate device (the SSD), and then mount the filesystem with the async option. It should provide a good performance boost.
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  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by kotrt99 View Post
    Where would you get a server with the same specs with 2x750 GB disks for that price?
    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

  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by amelen View Post
    I would use the SSD for the OS drive only..
    Why??? What benefit are you going to get from it other than 2 seconds shaved off the boot time.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by jpwjpw View Post
    Why??? What benefit are you going to get from it other than 2 seconds shaved off the boot time.
    Well, for one, if the server ever goes into swap, it would perform a lot better Second, since SSD drives are only available in small sizes so far, that seems like the best use for them.
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  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by amelen View Post
    Well, for one, if the server ever goes into swap, it would perform a lot better Second, since SSD drives are only available in small sizes so far, that seems like the best use for them.
    Buying more RAM would probably be cheaper They do also save power, but having one for the sake of it seems a bit of a waste

  24. #24
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    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.

  25. #25
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    Consider RAIDing 2x 7200 RPM drives instead. The price to space ratio is far better and the I/O speeds are alarmingly similar.
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