SSDs in an enterprise enclosure....

[mrbios]

Rather than complicate this with who what where when and why i'm just interested in your opinion these things:

Would you use standard non-enterprise SSDs in an enterprise enclosure?

If yes the scenario is, 256gb per drive, 4 drives in a RAID6, tiered storage solution, SQL and exchange database storage is the application, what drives do you buy?

If no can you give details as to why?

 

[mrbios]

I'm comparing what i'm being told from two locations and i'm being told that they're ideal for SQL databases due to the writes being infrequent and the databases when setup right don't fragment. (Note that these are small single server SQL databases, we're not talking anything huge here)

That said i'm taking both comments on board and what you've said does have me leaning away from them. At the moment i'm not convinced by either sides though, i need more convincing.

We've just had a bit of a conversation in the office over the whole thing and come to the conclusion between two of us that reliability should be favoured over raw performance, at the end of the day we'll get a fair bit of a performance boost by using 10 or 15k SAS drives anyway as currently we're running our VMs off 4 x 7200rpm 2TB SATA drives in RAID6 anyway.

The idea of SSDs is something which was bought up in a conversation over our new storage solution (Thecus N12000 enclosures - of which we're getting two, sitting them in two seperate buildings and having them replicate) Tiered storage still sounds a good idea from the aspect that things like domain controllers, file server etc. can all run from the SATA disks while more intensive systems such as our SQL server, exchange server etc can all run off the SAS disks, but i think the SSD idea may have been a non-starter.

 

[mrbios]

I've found these "OCZ Talos C Series Solid state drive 230 GB" at an ocuk competitor for £436 per drive, now that's not far off being affordable, but they say in the specs they use MLC technology.

I noticed intel now have some MLC enterprise drives (710 series) due to various bits of work with the controller that has made it possible, anyone have any opinion on these drives?

EDIT: then again, the C series talos drives have a much lower NRE than the R series which are nearly £100 more expensive. That said £530 for 200GB is still the cheapest i've found.

 

[mrbios]

Seagate make great SSDs, the are Enterprise MLC (Pulsar.2) or SLC (Pulsar.XT),

With a nice starting price at nearly £1k for 100gb

You should see a big performance boost going from 4 sata in raid6 to sas. Why are you using raid6 with 4 disks anyway? you loose two to parity and performance is crap might aswell go with raid10? are these consumer drivers or enterprise?

Enterprise, redundancy and reliability are more important in the area they're used than performance (and performance is generally pretty good)

 

[mrbios]

Are the VMs that big? ie how much of the 4tb are they using?

Currently 1.3TB free out of the total 3.64TB, so using just over 50% at the moment.

 

[mrbios]

Ah we can get the 100GB at a small £500 each!



The Intel 710s are a good shout as well, good drives and slightly cheaper.

So far the best i've been able to find is the OCZ Talos R series for £500 If they were £400 they'd be a viable option.