Re: Solid State Drives with PG

Gordan Bobic wrote:
> 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.

Please; there is nobody bashing Intel here who gives a damn about vendor
payola in any direction. Intel's drives are not suitable for enterprise
database use because their write cache policy both fails testing and
isn't documented properly to figure out how to work around its
limitations (if that's even possible). That' s the end of the story; if
your drive gets corrupted and you lose your database, it doesn't matter
how good any of the other things you mention are.

> 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.

If you're not testing write cache durability under harsh conditions like
a power plug pull, you're not doing a fair comparison. SAN hardware
should include good behavior under such situations, it's part of what
you're paying for, while many cheaper solutions do not. It's
straightforward to beat the performance of a SAN, but what makes people
buy them anyway is their ruggedness under really bad failure conditions
that direct-attached storage can struggle with.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us