Re: Latest advice on SSD?

You don't mention the size of your database. Does it fit in memory? If so
your disks aren't going to matter a whole lot outside of potentially being
i/o bound on the writes. Otherwise getting your data into SSDs absolutely
can have a few multiples of performance impact. The NVME M.2 drives can
really pump out the data. Maybe push your WAL onto those (as few
motherboards have more than two connectors) and use regular SSDs for your
data if you have high write rates.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for strong cloud hosting for Postgres but the
speed of physical hardware, feel free to contact me as my company does this
for some companies who found i/o limits on regular cloud providers to be
way too slow for their needs.

good luck (and pardon the crass commercial comments!),

-- Ben Scherrey

On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 9:36 AM, Craig James <cjames(at)emolecules(dot)com> wrote:

> One of our four "big iron" (spinning disks) servers went belly up today.
> (Thanks, Postgres and pgbackrest! Easy recovery.) We're planning to move to
> a cloud service at the end of the year, so bad timing on this. We didn't
> want to buy any more hardware, but now it looks like we have to.
>
> I followed the discussions about SSD drives when they were first becoming
> mainstream; at that time, the Intel devices were king. Can anyone recommend
> what's a good SSD configuration these days? I don't think we want to buy a
> new server with spinning disks.
>
> We're replacing:
> 8 core (Intel)
> 48GB memory
> 12-drive 7200 RPM 500GB
> RAID1 (2 disks, OS and WAL log)
> RAID10 (8 disks, postgres data dir)
> 2 spares
> Ubuntu 16.04
> Postgres 9.6
>
> The current system peaks at about 7000 TPS from pgbench.
>
> Our system is a mix of non-transactional searching (customers) and
> transactional data loading (us).
>
> Thanks!
> Craig
>
> --
> ---------------------------------
> Craig A. James
> Chief Technology Officer
> eMolecules, Inc.
> ---------------------------------
>