I am busy reading Gregory Smith' s PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance and when the book was written he seemed to me a bit sceptical about SSD's. I suspect the reliability of the SSD's has improved significantly since then.
Our present server (128Gb RAM and 2.5 Tb disk space and 12 CPU cores - RAID 10) will become a development server and we are going to buy a new server. At the moment the 'base' directory uses 1.5Tb of disk space and there is still more data to come. The database contains blbliometric data that receive updates on a weekly basis but not much changes other than that except for cleaning of data by a few persons. Some of the queries can take many hours to finish. On our present system there are sometimes more than 300GB in temporary files which I suspect will not be the case on the new system with a much larger RAM. Analysis or the SAR-logs showed that there were too much iowait in the CPU's on the old system which has a lower spec CPU than the ones considered for the new system. We are looking possibly the following hardware: CPU: 2 x Ivy Bridge 8C E5-2667V2 3.3G 25M 8GT/s QPI - 16 cores RAM: 24 x 32GB DDR3-1866 2Rx4 LP ECC REG RoHS - 768Gb with enough disk space - about 4.8 Tb on RAID 10. My question is about the possible advantage and usage of SSD disks in the new server. At the moment I am considering using 2 x 200GB SSD' s for a separate partion for temporary files and 2 x 100GB for the operating system. So my questions: 1. Will the SSD's in this case be worth the cost? 2. What will the best way to utilize them in the system? Regards Johann -- Because experiencing your loyal love is better than life itself, my lips will praise you. (Psalm 63:3)
