Re: Solid State Drives with PG

John R Pierce wrote:

> all the enterprise SAN guys I've talked with say the Intel x25 drives
> are consumer junk, about the only thing they will use is STEC Zeus, and
> even then they mirror them.

A couple of points there.

1) Mirroring flash drives is a bit ill advised since flash has a rather
predictable long-term wear-out failure point. It would make more sense
to mirror with a mechanical disk and use the SSD for reads, with some
clever firmware to buffer up the extra writes to the mechanical disk and
return completed status as soon as the data has been committed to the
faster flash disk.

2) How much of that dislike of Intel is actually justified by something
other than the margins offered / procurement policy (a.k.a. buying from
the vendor that sends you the best present rather than from the vendor
that has the best product)? Intel X25-E drives have write endurance,
performance and power consumption (150mW TDP!) that are at least as good
as other enterprise grade drives. Most enterprise grade drives don't
even have trim support yet. I wouldn't knock Intel drives until you've
tried them. Also bear in mind that Intel X25-E drives have high street
prices similar to similar sized 15,000rpm mechanical drives you might
buy from a SAN vendor (of course, same drives without the re-badge can
be had for a fraction of the price).

Then again, I never did have a very high opinion of big name SAN vendor
hardware - I have always achieved better results at a fraction of the
cost with appliances I've built myself.

Gordan