SSD Drives in Servers

[seoArt]

I just wanted to follow up on this thread [webmasterworld.com ] that was started about a year ago when I first started running SSD drives in a web server.

So far, so good. They have been running without issue, and the server is handling about 30k visitors per day now. The DB for the forums on it is up to about 2GB now.

The SSD I put in my laptop is still running fine as well.

Curious if anyone else has some SSD experience to share about reliability.

[lammert]

Thanks for coming back with your experiences, it is good to hear some positive long term results of using SSD.

[Frank_Rizzo]

I am using one this year. I'm pretty sure it will be reliable but I'm not so sure of the performance.

I just can't get bandwidth and iops scores as good as it says on the box. I don't know if this is normal, if this is because the partition is not right, or if it is some other O/S compatibility problem.

Intel SSD 320 120Gb rated 270MB/s, 38K iops

Running hdparm I get varying results each time I reinstall Centos 6.2. One time I could get 260MB, the next install I got 160MB. Another time 230MB but after copying 2GB files onto the partition it dropped to 180MB. It's so confusing.

fio is the only thing that produces consistent results.

4k block size = 20MB/s and 5200 iops
512k block size = 200Mb/s and 380 iops

Reliability? I am confident these Intels are the best you can get. Performance? No doubt this is much, much faster than a HDD but the results are nowhere near as what it says on the tin.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>performance

I think a lot has to do whether the disk block has been written to before. Headline specs seem to be based on a new disk.

[Frank_Rizzo]

BTW how are you measuring reliability? Are you checking SMART to see if there are errors, is the Media Wearout Indicator changing?