Chuck Anderson <cra@WPI.EDU> writes:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 04:46:44PM -0500, Jim Dibb wrote:
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Chuck Anderson <cra@wpi.edu> wrote:
I'm interested. I was considering using SSDs for my boot drive. Is RAID protection necessary/advisable using SSDs?
SSDs have much higher reliability than HDD. Mirroring is the only RAID level that does not impose a write penalty. Mirroring SSDs is expensive
Based on these 3 points, I'd say a backup is a much better solution than RAID, unless you want to (R)AID-0 them into a stripe for even more insane performance.
But then again, you didn't state how important your uptime of your system is. Sorry for leaving that bit out....
Uptime/availability isn't that important, but backups are since RAID *is* my backup (plus rsync to other RAIDed systems for the most important data). With traditional disk drives, it hasn't been too expensive to slap a 2nd system drive in for RAID 1/mirroring. SSDs are much more expensive, so if as you say they are more reliable, perhaps I can forgo the expense of doing RAID on them.
I've seen many claims that SSDs are more reliable than traditional HDDs, but I haven't seen data to back up those claims. My main concern is that SSDs are still young, so they haven't had much soak time. Whether or not the flash is reliable is only a small part of the battle. Buggy firmware is a much more likely problem at this stage in the game. No single point of failure is a good design point when dealing with your data. ;-) I remain cautiously optimistic (though I've already bricked one drive). Cheers, Jeff