Do you need a server AND a humidor?

[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

[poker]

I guess my only question would be "why?"

I mean I like grape jelly, and I also like sushi, but you wont see me mixing the 2 together.

[s15driftking]

Originally Posted by poker

I mean I like grape jelly, and I also like sushi, but you wont see me mixing the 2 together.

you are missing out my friend!!

[doctorcue]

[Totemic]

Originally Posted by MajorCaptSilly

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

Are you referring to Intel SLC based drives? They are averaging around $600 for a 64GB system. SLC based drives are EXTREMELY expensive right now (there's also the M line which is MLC based, and are cheaper but still more expensive than harddrives, not to mention less performant/reliable than the SLC version). And probably will be for the next few years. I'm sure with Moore's Law kicking in, they'll drop in price, but I think it'll still be a few years before they can compete with harddrives.

And you shouldn't be comparing them with SAS drives since those are really designed for different purposes. SAS are designed for high speed random access (especially random writes). Flash based SSD drive's random writes are pretty anemic compared to SAS drives (yes, sequential read/writes rock, but servers generally don't do a lot of sequential read/writes).

Now DRAM based SSD would be great, but those have other drawbacks (namely if the power to the drives go down and you've not committed the transaction to some sort of non-volatile store, you're going to lose those transactions--a drawback, that's absolutely verboten in the server world). A hybrid DRAM based SSD with battery backup + harddrives would be great though, but also freakishly expensive, you know like the one that Sun recently introduced. Although I have no idea what would happen if a database engine wrote a transaction using write through mode--is that write hitting the DRAM or the harddrive?

Anyways, kind of pointless diversion from the original topic. Which is a "cute but very impractical idea".