SSD in Servers

nickcardwell

nickcardwell

nickcardwell

Associate
Joined
20 May 2007
Posts
159
Background:
The company who makes our Document Management system is recommending SSD for our indexing server (indexing documents) (due to the number of users (250) and documents (2.5million))

We have used a few OCZ Agility in laptops (approx 8) , and have found about 1/2 of them have suddenly died randomly.

I asked the company , what do they use /recommend and they are using a SATA crucial realSSD

Im just concerned about them just dying randomly too + using a normal SSD in an enterprise server.

So my questions:

What are people using (if any ) in servers for solid state disk?
Are the pci-e versions more reliable?

We require roughly a 512Mb version , i expect 75% read 25% right.
 
They are used for cache and L2ARC in ZFS servers.

They are fine, and will be fully redundant.
 
Personally wouldnt go OCZ at all never mind in servers, just like with HDDs you get enterprise quality SSDs and PCIe SSD cards... we use the in database and web servers I find them reliable.

Stelly
 
OCZ have an enterprise SSD range, I would go with them if I had any buying power.

http://www.oczenterprise.com/interfaces/sas.html

Some san manufactures don't allow non approved HD in to their sans. For example netapp they won't allow you to purchase your own HD, it voids support and warranty. Instead they want you to purchase overpriced hard drives through them.

Netapp recently quoted us £12k for 12x 7200rpm sata drives (lol)
 
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nickcardwell said:
any particular make or model you went for?
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basically... and I hold my hands up to this... due to people saying that they have had issues with the Vertex range of SSDs high failure rate etc we didnt want to consider OCZ for our enterprise range

Stelly
 
Wouldn't touch OCZ, heard of too much of their kit dying. (Not just SSDs, RAM too).

Personally I'd stick to either Corsair or Intel. Corsair have a long running reputation for excellent quality PSUs and RAM, and I don't think I've heard anything bad about their SSDs. Intel are often mentioned when reliability is questioned as well.
 
Some san manufactures don't allow non approved HD in to their sans. For example netapp they won't allow you to purchase your own HD, it voids support and warranty. Instead they want you to purchase overpriced hard drives through them.
Click to expand...

Watch out for this. We put some Crucial M4 SSD's in a couple of Dell servers at work for testing and any time the server is rebooted the RAID controller forgets about them and we have to manually intervene to import the foreign config. We also get an error about the drive being non-OEM that turns the status LCD orange and can only be "fixed" by wiping the whole event log on the iDRAC.
Once booted though they run beautifully.
 
Intel 520 or 7xx series are fab SSDs. Massively improved performance & reliability compared to older drives, and a fraction of the price of SLC 'enterprise' drives. What to choose depends on your requirements and budget.
 
101001101 said:
SLC is fine, 2million hours is the average life cycle I think - but wouldn't touch MLC in a server environment, for desktops / laptops sure.
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Depends exactly what you're doing. Under provisioning can extend the write endurance, but working out how much data you're writing is the key really. SLC for important stuff though for sure.
 
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