anyone using a solid state drive ?

Quote from pairsarbtooo:

work from your solid state drive for speed and then backup daily to a dedicated hard drive ....does anyone do this?
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I run dual raid on one 265GB SSD and one 10K RPM SCSI HD.
 
Quote from ProfLogic:

I run dual raid on one 265GB SSD and one 10K RPM SCSI HD.
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That's doable? I thought the RAID drives had to be identical.. Of course with no experience with RAID I'm liable to be thinking anything at any given time...

I'd think that the slowest drive would set the speed if you have it set to mirror image all the time.. maybe the mirroring is a background task relative to the realtime operations?

At any rate those SSD drives are charging ahead full steam, last time I looked, and it doesn't seem like it was all that long ago, they were pitifully slow, small , and expensive... now they are just small and expensive.. i'll give them a year or two maybe...
 
You do have to be careful of some of the info in this thread particularly the "only intel's etc" type of stuff as reviews tend to be out of date very quickly. Also some of the reviewers seem remarkably ignorant of the products out there.

Things to note re dcraig's good points:

- you can also run your SSDs in raid for corresponding gains. Standalone raid controllers are needed to get the sort of potential speed that they can give.

- I have an older (read untrimmable and poorer reuse management) SSD so I resolved the issue of writing large numbers of random writes for trading data by using a ramdisk. All my data goes to ramdisk and is periodically automatically backed up to the SSD.

My primary goal with the SSD was silence and low power use (my hard drives spend most of the day not spinning) and it achieved that. It was also pleasantly fast.

The greatest speed increase comes though because I have browser cache, tws, and my charting apps data store all on the ramdisk. Once I started moving stuff around I realized that ram is so much faster that as long as you resolve backup/risk issues to your satisfaction it should do the bulk of your active storage if possible.



Quote from dcraig:

I think they would be very good for some usages. The average access times are ~ 0.1 msec compared to ~ 12 - 15 msec for consumer type hard disks. This makes for phenomenal I/O rates for database applications. You would need some serious raid setups for hard disk drives to go anywhere near what a good SSD can do.

Sequential read/write performance maybe around twice that of a conventional hard drive. But you can probably do much the same with two or three conventional disks in Raid 0 config.

The sequential throughput is approaching the limit of SATA II controllers, so that is not likely to improve much before SATA III arrives.

One downside is that they do wear out - probably sooner than a conventional drive. The cells can only be erased and rewritten a limited number of times. I've seen figures of 10000 to 100000 times mentioned. This may not matter for a system or root disk, but it's not hard to imagine that some usage patterns may be an issue. One that comes to mind is logging real time tick data to a database where each tick causes an erase/rewrite cycle to the disk "block".

There are (more expensive) enterprise class SSDs that use SLC technology that are supposed to be much more durable than the MLC retail products.
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Quote from Scataphagos:

Should. Some have 3-year warranty. Patriot has 10 years.
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Just because it has a 10 year warranty does not mean they expect it will last that long. They probably figure that the drive will be worth less than $10 5 years from now and that anyone who has one fail will simply decide that it's not worth the effort to go through the warranty procedure for an obsolete drive. Either that or they figure 90% of customers never bother to register their product for the warranty.
 
Quote from SNYP40A1:

Just because it has a 10 year warranty does not mean they expect it will last that long. They probably figure that the drive will be worth less than $10 5 years from now and that anyone who has one fail will simply decide that it's not worth the effort to go through the warranty procedure for an obsolete drive. Either that or they figure 90% of customers never bother to register their product for the warranty.
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I checked Intel's warranty... apparently registration of SSD is not required... as is the case with most makers these days.

When the SSDs first came out, their warranty was 1 year or less on some. Nice to know one will be able to use their SSD for 3 years or more if desired, but likely will be replaced by newer, faster, bigger, less cost per GB
before then.

The Intel SSDs are quite snappy, and Intel says they plan on making random writes faster on future versions.

I'm still showing 60 MBs on 4k random writes when dirty (XP).... can't complain about that.
 
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