[ale] semi OT - to SSD or not to SSD

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 10/28/11 9:06 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> We use SSDs in a high end disk array for our main Production DB (we got the array just about a year ago).  Performance has been exceptional and so far the only drive that has failed in the array was one of the SATA drives not one of the SSDs.
>
> On the flip side we tried to use one of the FusionIO SSD cards and experienced significant data loss due when it failed.   The card has redundancy on the RAM and an algorithm to help prevent overuse of any given bit.   The flaw in using a single one was that the ROM chip itself failed thereby preventing access to the RAM and the algorithm.   The lesson from this for me is that one should NOT use a single SSD any more than they should rely on a single IDE, SAS or SATA.   Had we mirrored the cards we'd not have lost the data.  Of course that is cost prohibitive.   Additionally the cards are very sensitive to heat.
>
> So far haven't used SSDs as boot drives but so long as they were in a RAID configuration I'd have no more qualms about using them than IDE, SAS or SATA and given performance increase would definitely prefer SSDs.
I did this on a 4.5TB (effective) file server I built for my previous 
employer using Supermicro hardware (saved them tens of thousands over an 
IBM-rebadged NetApp SAN appliance that was junk).  Two Imation SSD 
drives inside the cabinet, small boot partitions on each and then a 
partition on each RAID1ed via md for /.  /var was on a pair of 80GB 
SATAs on the front.  The SSDs did survive a ~120F baking for a few 
hours; two of the eight 1TB SATAs (four RAID10s) went out of spec but no 
data was lost.