[MajorCaptSilly]

Originally Posted by Totemic

There's basically two types of SSD:

Flash memory based and DRAM based.

Flash memory based SSD is really not very suitable for server roles simply because they have some serious drawbacks when making a lot of write ops on the storage. Write tend to be slow, there are limited number of write cycles per cell, and generally if you change a single byte in a cell, you have to re-write the entire cell, etc...

DRAM based systems potentially are significantly worse than platter based harddrives where power draw is concerned. An idle harddrive uses very little power. An idle DRAM based SSD pretty much uses just as much power as a non-idle DRAM based SSD.

So if you're using the server as a file server (serving up mostly static files with very little in way of new files being added), then yeah a flash based SSD should work and may lower some of the power draw. However, I'd say that's a fairly pointless exercise since you're looking at a LOT of $$$ for an SSD based server--might as well just get a harddrive based server and buy a really nice thermoelectrically cooled humidor with the money (it'll probably end up being cheaper).

I was referring to the Intel brand of SSD's. Watch prices on these by the end of this year. They should be very close to current prices on 15K SAS drives.

MCS