[SGVLUG] ssd and linux

[Matthew Campbell]

I have been running the SSD cards for the last two years.  Windoze has a
problem with the card drivers - it can't boot off the card before you load
the OS (duh!) but it works fine as a secondary drive.  Fedora booted right
up on them, but that's Fedora.

It is true that the SSD technology degrades over time, but when you look at
the numbers in a real world scenario it simply doesn't make any
difference.  You would have to be running your machine 24/7 crunching data
for 5 years before you saw any degradation, and how many of your top line
servers are still current after five years of technology change?  After
reading a number of white papers on the technology I turned on swap and
indexing on the SSD card and saw another good increase in responsiveness.

If you stick with the drive form factor (which is performance limited by
bus speed) you don't see the driver problems I ran into with the cards.

Here are the cards I'm running:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-revodrive-x2-pci-express-ssd.html
740MB/s sequential speeds and random small file writes up to 120,000 IOPS

Which is higher than the comparable SATA form factor SSDs available at the
time
Here are the current 3.5" format drives from the same manufacturer:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-vertex-2-sata-ii-3-5-ssd.html
Which run at 50,000 IOPS and ~250MB/s throughput.

As a comparison the enterprise grade SATA drives I am running in my server
are:
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/3-5/constellation-es/
150MB/s, 1050 IOPS

The price has fallen where they're worth putting into an older system to
bring it back to life.

Matt

---------
*Matthew Campbell*
Storage Solution Consultant
Storage Design and Engineering

*Kaiser Permanente*
IMG-Systems Integration
99 S. Oakland
Pasadena, CA 91101

626-564-7228 (office)
8-338-7228 (tie-line)
818-314-9897 (mobile phone)
Green Center 3-North, 031W29
---------
*kp.org/thrive*



On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 10:59 PM, matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > So, watching the prices go down, and wondering...
> >
> > Anyone here have experience with linux and SSDs?
>
> My two year old notes say:
> 1) the only disks worth even thinking about are Intel's
> 2) and even so they're no good for heavy disk crunching (like
> repeated building of complex C++ projects like chrome;
> it starts off fast but then degrades.)
>
> My wife's been using a 100GB one for a year or two
> just to hold Windows 7, all her data is on a real disk.
> Boot times are indeed significantly faster.
>
> If I got one for Linux, I would put just the OS on it,
> not /var and not /home.  But then I also don't buy
> cars with power windows.
> - Dan
>
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