[Discuss] SSD

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 05/31/2012 11:44 AM, Stephen Adler wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-05-31 at 11:09 -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
>> On 5/31/2012 10:57 AM, Richard McCluskey wrote:
>>> If I had a desktop I would put them in there too.  I you need fast
>>> disk I/O then it is totally worth it in my opinion.
>> That's the kicker: do you really need that performance?
>> Tangentially: is it worth the premium and the much shorter life?
>>
>> Typically, more RAM is a better investment than replacing the system 
>> drive with flash.  If you do go the SSD route then more RAM is going to 
>> mean less paging which means longer life for the SSD.  Either way, more 
>> RAM is the first step.
>>
> Thank you for this great thread on SSDs. My workstation currently has 24
> Gigs of memory so I think I'm OK on the RAM side. The plan is to get
> several of these SSDs and use them for my virtual systems. I typically
> run three at a time. What ends up happening is as I run my virtual
> system, I can hear the disk heads thrashing about, especially with the
> windows virtual system. So I figure I can load the OS and apps on the
> SSDs and I should get my improvement. (Maybe I'll utube my upgrade...)
>
> It sounds like the SSD technology is mature enough that this upgrade
> path makes some sense. The bit I'm worried about is disk crashes with
> the SSDs not working due to what ever with the memory system of the
> drives. (I take it they run parity memory?) Does it make sense to have a
> raid setup for redundancy? Or just trust the drives will work fine? By
> putting just the OS on the SSDs, the idea is that if there is a
> catastrophic failure, all I loose is the time to reload and reconfigure
> the OS. My home directory would still be on the old trusty magnetic
> "analogue" disk drives which I run a raid system on.
>
>
>
IMHO, using SSD for VMs seems like a good use. The PC-based VM (VBOX,
VMWare) is much different from the old mainframe systems. I personally
think (an opinion I have led for 30 years) that "old trusty magnetic
"analogue" disk drives" would be replaced by SSD drives. Back in the
'70s we had Bubble Memory which was  unreliable. The new flock of SSD
drives seem to be gaining ground, but will not catch up until the cost
per byte starts to equalize.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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