Re: Considering Solid State Drives

Search the PG performance mailing list archive. There has been some good
posts about SSD drives there related to PG use.

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Allan Kamau
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:42 PM
To: Postgres General Postgres General
Subject: [GENERAL] Considering Solid State Drives

Hi,
As part of datamining activity. I have some plpgsql functions
(executed in parallel, up to 6 such concurrent calls) that perform
some reads and writes of large number of (maybe 10000) records at a
time to a table having multi-column primary key.
It seems the writing of these few thousands records is taking a long
time (up to 5mins in some cases).
Running vmstat reports %iowait between 15 and 24 on a single 7200rpm
SATA drive, six core (Phenom II) "server".

I am now thinking of investing in a SSD (Solid State Drive), and maybe
choosing between "Crucial Technology 256GB Crucial M225 Series
2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (CT256M225)" and "Intel X25-M G2 (160GB) -
Intel MLC". I have looked at the comparison statistics given here
"http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/137?vs=126" that suggests that
the Intel offering is more geared for small random write operations.

After googling I found little resent content (including survival
statistics) of using SSDs in a write intensive database environment.

Kindly advice,

Allan.