Re: Making the most of memory?

Guy Rouillier wrote:
> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> I assume you're talking about solid state drives? They have their
>> uses, but for most use cases, having plenty of RAM in your server will
>> be a better way to spend your money. For certain high throughput,
>> relatively small databases (i.e. transactional work) the SSD can be
>> quite useful.
>
> Unless somebody has changes some physics recently, I'm not understanding
> the recent discussions of SSD in the general press. Flash has a limited
> number of writes before it becomes unreliable. On good quality consumer
> grade, that's about 300,000 writes, while on industrial grade it's about
> 10 times that. That's fine for mp3 players and cameras; even
> professional photographers probably won't rewrite the same spot on a
> flash card that many times in a lifetime. But for database
> applications, 300,000 writes is trivial. 3 million will go a lot longer,
> but in non-archival applications, I imagine even that mark won't take
> but a year or two to surpass.

One trick they use is to remap the physical Flash RAM to different logical addresses. Typical apps update a small percentage of the data frequently, and the rest of the data rarely or never. By shuffling the physical Flash RAM around, the media lasts a lot longer than a simple analysis might indicate.

Craig