Dell Poweredge SSD Drives

[bigdunc]

Hi

We are looking at getting a new office server and have previously only used SAS drives. Has anyone delved into using SSD drives for a server? Are they considerably faster? Any issues in setting up RAID 5 with them?

Cheers

 

[bigdunc]

We've just started rolling out a few SAS SSDs to our HPE servers.

In theory there is no problem with using them in RAID5, although in reality depending on your use case, you may just be better with a pair of big drives in RAID1, as even standard 6G SATA SSD drives will easily max out gigabit connections, so if you are looking for transfer rate improvements (rather than just random I/O) then you will need to look at 2.5Gb/5Gb/10Gb/25Gb+ ethernet if you haven't already

Both RAID1 and RAID5 will wear all of the drives out at a similar rate, so ideally I would allow for a cold spare drive either now, or in a few months time and then swap that in to avoid all of the drives failing at the same time due to wear (although you should be able to gauge wear via the RAID controller software).

It's worth looking on ebay / specialist enterprise I.T. brokers as you can often get several used but low wear enterprise drives, for the cost of a single New drive.

I was hoping there would be a general increase in performance of the server as there isn't a huge amount in difference in cost of the drives. I would be adding a dedicated spare drive as redundancy for the RAID

 

[bigdunc]

It depends what your server is doing?

Things that do benefit:
Database Servers - (Especially if you are RAM limited)
File Server for user profiles / redirected folders - (typically lots of little files etc)
Virtualisation/Containers
10Gb+ File Server - SSD almost requirement to be able to provide require transfer speeds

Things that don't really benefit:
General File Server - an array of SAS 10K drives with a decent controller/cache will easily keep up at gigabit speeds
Boot drive - most servers the bios/post tests far outweight the actual amount of time spent loading Windows, so time saving is negligable


Also be careful when comparing the cost of drives - for HPE especially it can be misleading when you see SSD prices, but then realise they are READ Intensive spec drives rather than Mainstream Endurance or Write Intensive

It would be for a file server with user profiles and folder redirections. The quote we have had is for read intensive drives. Would they they ok or should we be looking for mixed use drives instead?

 

[bigdunc]

Cheers both for the advice. Going to get requoted with mixed use drives. Should be the correct one as it is a new build server but I'll check anyway