>> Anyway, the point of all this is to prevent an HD failure from >> stopping the system. An SSD is much safer, right? > > SSDs are still relatively new technology, so predicting failure rates is > less reliable. What's wrong with using RAID-1? It's proven technology and > totally resistant to a single HD failure.
Well, I've read great things about the reliability of SSDs. Here's a comment from Samsung: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/23/samsung-puts-the-kibosh-on-ssd-reliability-worries/ "a pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn't reach the theoretical write limit" So in theory, the things are very reliable, but we wonder how they do in the real world. I'm considering a Super Talent Ultradrive which uses the relatively new Indilinx controller. There are 60 reviews of these drives on newegg.com. Of these 60, there are only 2 reports of operational problems, most of the remainder are glowing tales of speed and silence. This is a "cheap" drive using technology that is new even for an SSD, and still the newegg.com reports aren't dominated by reports of "DOA!" or "Failed within 1 week!" like all of the newegg.com HD reports I've seen. Of course, this is far from empirical evidence of SSD reliability, but it's very encouraging. I shy away from RAID1 for a few reasons. I posted these a little while ago: 1. RAID is another layer to learn, install, and maintain. 2. RAID isn't foolproof: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/2126252&from=rss http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 3. RAID is relatively expensive on a hosted server. Let's assume that without RAID, the hard drive in use fails every 3 years and causes 24 hours of downtime with good backups. That's a loss of .09% uptime over 3 years. If the server makes $100,000/year (and the same amount every day), that's a loss of $273 over 3 years. However, my host wants $105/month for a second 15k hard drive and RAID controller card. The cost of that over 3 years is $3,780. - Grant
