Re: Intel SSDs that may not suck

On 03/28/2011 04:21 PM, Greg Smith wrote:
> 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.

I decided a while ago that I wasn't going to buy a personal SSD until I
could get one without a volatile write cache for less than what a
battery-backed caching controller costs. That seemed the really
disruptive technology point for the sort of database use I worry about.
According to
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167050 that
point was today, with the new 120GB drives now selling for $240. UPS
willing, later this week I should have one of those here for testing.

A pair of those mirrored with software RAID-1 runs $480 for 120GB. LSI
MegaRAID 9260-4i with 512MB cache is $330, ditto 3ware 9750-4i. Battery
backup runs $135 to $180 depending on model; let's call it $150. Decent
"enterprise" hard drive without RAID-incompatible firmware, $90 for
500GB, need two of them. That's $660 total for 500GB of storage.

If you really don't need more than 120GB of storage, but do care about
random I/O speed, this is a pretty easy decision now--presuming the
drive holds up to claims. As the claims are reasonable relative to the
engineering that went into the drive now, that may actually be the case.

--
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