Chuck Anderson <cra@WPI.EDU> writes:
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 06:26:31PM -0500, Jeff Moyer wrote:
If anyone is interested in a talk on SSDs, chime in. I can present my experiences with these devices. I've evaluated the performance of several vendors' products, ranging from the poor to the exemplary. I can talk about the modifications made in the block layer to accommodate for these devices, and the current implementation of the block discard support (which maps to ATA TRIM, which is important for device lognevity and performance) and how that is wired up to file systems such as ext4.
I'm interested. I was considering using SSDs for my boot drive. Is RAID protection necessary/advisable using SSDs?
The answer is, as always, it depends. I'll cover this in more depth when I give the talk, but any RAID algorithm that needs to initialize every block of the device is going to hurt performance on SSDs. There is some question about the durability/reliability of the drives, and some of those concerns are valid, others aren't. If you are diligent about backups, or if the disk just holds the OS, I wouldn't worry too much about RAID. HTH, Jeff