Intel SSDs that may not suck

Today is the launch of Intel's 3rd generation SSD line, the 320 series.
And they've finally produced a cheap consumer product that may be useful
for databases, too! They've put 6 small capacitors onto the board and
added logic to flush the write cache if the power drops. The cache on
these was never very big, so they were able to avoid needing one of the
big super-capacitors instead. Having 6 little ones is probably a net
reliability win over the single point of failure, too.

Performance is only a little better than earlier generation designs,
which means they're still behind the OCZ Vertex controllers that have
been recommended on this list. I haven't really been hearing good
things about long-term reliability of OCZ's designs anyway, so glad to
have an alternative. *Important*: don't buy SSD for important data
without also having a good redundancy/backup plan. As relatively new
technology they do still have a pretty high failure rate. Make sure you
budget for two drives and make multiple copies of your data.

Anyway, the new Intel drivers fast enough for most things, though, and
are going to be very inexpensive. See
http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_320_review_300gb for some
simulated database tests. There's more about the internals at
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review and the white
paper about the capacitors is at
http://newsroom.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/38-4324/Intel_SSD_320_Series_Enhance_Power_Loss_Technology_Brief.pdf

Some may still find these two cheap for enterprise use, given the use of
MLC limits how much activity these drives can handle. But it's great to
have a new option for lower budget system that can tolerate some risk there.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us
"PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books