Striping Solid State Disks

[threaded]

Has anyone striped/RAIDed a collection of SSDs? A client is wondering if they'd achieve a performance boost. I've feeling it probably would. Especially on SEEK. So I'm asking for your input.

Incidentally the definition of 'RAID' and the cost of 'SSD' in combination made me chuckle.

 

[DimPrawn]

No.

They wouldn't get a performance boost, only a cost boost.

 

[stingman123]

for once I agree with DP, I can't really see a perfomance boost coming from these, good luck though

 

[Paddy]

Has anyone striped/RAIDed a collection of SSDs? A client is wondering if they'd achieve a performance boost. I've feeling it probably would. Especially on SEEK. So I'm asking for your input.

Incidentally the definition of 'RAID' and the cost of 'SSD' in combination made me chuckle.

I would not recommend using SSDs because of the life limiting R/Ws. SSDs have a very short life if you are doing a lot of R/Ws such as what a server OS would do.

 

[VectraMan]

I thought it was meant to be awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26enkCzkJHQ

 

[doodab]

Lots of people have tried it, there are a few articles on sites like anandtech e.g:

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532

The answer by and large seems to be what you would expect i.e. it gives you more IOPS and more throughput.

The latest fast and light Sony laptops use 4 x 64GB SSDs in RAID 0.

The current generation drives have addressed the early reliability problems and the intel, samsung, seagate etc ones are now as good or better than conventional drives in terms of MTBF, error rates and so on.

 

[Paddy]

There seems to be some debate on the issue but write endurance still seems to be limited to 100,000 cycles. That is fine for a laptop but not for a server. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

[Jeebo72]

There seems to be some debate on the issue but write endurance still seems to be limited to 100,000 cycles. That is fine for a laptop but not for a server. Correct me if I am wrong.

No need for correction. This seems to be a doing something for something's sake. Typical techy nonsense. If you really need a raid array, you need to be going old school on the disks.

 

[doodab]

There seems to be some debate on the issue but write endurance still seems to be limited to 100,000 cycles. That is fine for a laptop but not for a server. Correct me if I am wrong.

For the individual flash cells that is correct but the drives themselves overcome the problem by packing spare capacity and using "wear levelling" to balance the writes evenly across the drive i.e. they try to ensure that each block of flash is written to a roughly equal number of times.

 

[doodab]

No need for correction. This seems to be a doing something for something's sake. Typical techy nonsense. If you really need a raid array, you need to be going old school on the disks.

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.

If you need reliability and large capacity e.g. for a file server, then an array of conventional disks is the way to go, and if you need good sequential throughput e.g. for editing HD video then an array of conventional disks is still the way to go, but for some workloads SSDs are going to be a better choice.