On 12/30/11 22:41, Roland Smith wrote:
On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 11:13:24PM -0800, UFS User wrote:
I have run a lot of different FreeBSD systems off (fileservers, firewalls,
routers, etc.) off of compact flash cards[1] and have never had a CF part
fail.
Most of these were read-only mode, but some of them were left mounted 'rw'
for years (with no swapping, of course). The bottom line is, they never
failed, and some were (and are) in the field for over 8 years now.
But everyone I know (including me) has had an SSD fail, usually with no
explanation.
It seems that unlike disk drives, SMART doesn't really give you a warning with
SSDs.
But as a counterpoint, who hasn't ever had a harddrive fail? And there might
be some negativity bias [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias] at work
here too.
So is this just chance, or ... are CF cards really a lot more reliable than
SSD ?
Although I've been looking at SSD's, I've held off for now because of cost and
small disk sizes. But concrete data is relatively scarce, probably due to the
fact that SSD's haven't been available _that_ long.
There are several studies available for harddisks, e.g. from google
[http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf] and Carnagie Mellon
[http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html].
Generally, more disks fail as they age.
But studies concerning SSD's seem to be almost nonexistant. The most interesting
inventarization I found was on Tom's Hardware
[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html].
Some interesting quotes covering the main points;
Even though our data set is one-twentieth the size of previous studies
on
hard drives, our information starts to suggest that SLC-based SSDs are
no more
reliable than SAS and SATA hard drives.
...
Our data center survey exclusively covers Intel SSD failure rates
because
those are the drives that big businesses currently trust the most.
...
Should you be deterred from adopting a solid-state solution? So long as
you protect your data through regular backups, which is imperative
regardless
of your preferred storage technology, then we don't see any reason to
shy away
from SSDs.
Currently SSD's are too small for my taste. But when that changes, I'll
seriously consider switching to an SSD with an equal sized HDD for nightly
backups.
I'd only consider them in laptops- and even then I don't see too much
difference in power use, only shock resistance. And I'd back them up to
the network anyway- store most of the data on a fileserver and only copy
what was being worked on to the lap.
I can't see too much point otherwise, 60Gb is reasonable for a desktop
with the usual suspects and is reasonably priced (not too over the top
anyway...).
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