Re: Hardware recommendations

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 04:28, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Benjamin Krajmalnik <kraj(at)servoyant(dot)com> wrote:
>> My biggest concern with SSD drives is their life expectancy,
>
> Generally that's not a big issue, especially as the SSDs get larger.
> Being able to survive a power loss without corruption is more of an
> issue, so if you go SSD get ones with a supercapacitor that can write
> out the data before power down.

I agree with Benjamin here. Even if you put multiple SSD drives into a
RAID array, all the drives get approximately the same write load and
thus will likely wear out and fail at the same time!

> As for the Areca controllers, I haven't tested them with the latest
> drivers or firmware, but we would routinely get 180 to 460 days of
> uptime between lockups

That sucks! But does a BBU even help with SSDs? The flash eraseblock
is larger than the RAID cache unit size anyway, so as far as I can
tell, it might not save you in the case of a power loss.

Any thoughts whether software RAID on SSD is a good idea?

Regards,
Marti