[olug] SSD write durability in production use

[Rob Townley]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Will Langford <unfies at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Dan Anderson <dan-anderson at cox.net> wrote:
>
>> Look at the options from Texas Memory.
>>
>> RAM->Flash should go pretty fast and give you a good backup (mitigating the
>> battery life issue).
>>
>> I don't know anything about the gigabyte card or the WOW card you mention,
>> but if you can afford it you can get something that backs up to
>> flash (10,000+ backups) when the main power drops.
>>
>> In this case you use your battery life just to write your backup to flash
>> so
>> having 16 or 72 hours is overkill.
>>
>> Dan
>>
>
> WOW thing -> Fusion IO SSD
>
> http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39600/135/
>
> ---
>
> The rest -> hmmm. Perhaps I should mention that we've had people pull the
> power plug out of our servers ? :).  Many of the places we install servers
> to do not have a nice rack system with secure access stuff and all of that.
>  I did consider UPS power fail -> back it up to classic media... but ...
> idiots yanking power chords... ugh.
>
> Although -- in the places where the speed boost would be needed, it would be
> in places that have hundreds of clients.  As such, the extra cost to justify
> a rack or other secure enclosure would make sense.  I'll discuss it with
> coworkers :).  Data loss is end-of-business situation.
>
> I do remember looking at Texas Memory's offering as well as several other
> place's offerings :).  At the time, expense was rather prohibitive, but I
> imagine it's becoming much more reasonable now.
>
> -Will
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We are toying with the idea of a new server and someday when the db is
bigger than total system RAM, would like to eclipse our current hot
pluggable scsi (SCA) infrastructure (at least for writable databases)
with enterprise grade SSD.     How did the SSD based systems work out
for databases?   ssd or server vendors that you particularly liked for
 their ssd performance and reliability.   i have seen many consumer
grade SSDs that are much less expensive than a ~$400 147GB SAS drive,
but i wonder about the price of enterprise grade SSD?  Have we reached
a point in which firmware level "Wear Leveling Algorithms" and the
hardware itself are better than the moving parts of a platter?  If
not, when?  I suppose a RAID5 or better of solid state drives is still
necessary, but then again, that is a another whole subsystem that has
to be smart about dealing with SSD.

stec-inc.com claims to make enterprise grade solid state drives for
EMC.  Anybody use these?  Newegg does not seem to have the stec brand.

The impact of static electricity on silicon is greater than the impact
of static electricity upon a disk platter.   Platters have got to be
more immune.  Because of this, SSDs create a new scenario.  When the
usb stick or SSD offers a path to ground for static electricity, how
is it not damaged?  Experience has seemed to bear that out, i haven't
had many flash (USB and SD) based memory devices, but a much higher
percentage have failed.  No, i don't use wrist straps nor a
anti-static mat because that is for sissies, but the thought of
releasing tens of thousands of volts into the most important
non-living object in the enterprise, the server hard drives, does give
me pause.