[NTLUG:Discuss] SSD on Linux Desktop

[Chris Cox]

On 04/13/2012 04:32 PM, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 02:44:01PM -0500, Ralph Green wrote:
>> The size of your drive and
>> how sensitime you are to the SSD wearing out should affect your usage.
>>   Most SSDs that I have seen are based around MLC flash cells and they
>> don't have a long life.
>
> To me, SSD lifetimes have thus far been a non-issue.
>
...snip...
> Anyway, my take is that for my needs and desires, prices
> are now low enough and performance/reliability is high
> enough that SSD wear isn't an important consideration for me.
> (I also respect that others may have different takes and
> values here, so what works for me might be unacceptable to
> others.)
>
> Pm

While it's still a bit early to tell for me... I'd say that so far, SSD 
has proven to be MORE reliable than spinning disk.  Just saying.  So I 
can't say what the failure rates of "good" SSD are after 5 years of 
heavy service, what I had at IBM was a couple of years old and without 
issue.

With that said, there is SSD and there is SSD.  At the enterprise level,
eMLC is considered to be about as good as SLC.  At home, MLC is good, 
but old cheap on card SSD ... maybe not so much.  The early stuff had a 
lot of issues (the things found in the early netbooks for example).

And with that said, I have seen enterprise device onboard flash fail.. 
and that's similar to the netbook example above.  But with regards to 
SATA SSD of any reasonable contemporary nature (past couple of 
years).... things seem to be ok.

Let's face it... what are the odds of spinning disk failure after just 3 
years?  It's pretty high (under load).  I'm willing to say that SSD will 
beat that almost always.  If 3 years isn't enough, how about 5?  If 
you're like me, between 3-5 years, I'm going to see a significant 
percentage of failure on even high end SAS spinning disk.

The thing to be aware of on SSD is that they can slow down.... they'll 
still be fast though.  Just maybe not enough in a single drive case to 
warrant the drive switch vs. the cheaper spinning disk (YMMV).

If you want high IOPS and you expect to use tiers (talking enterprise), 
I find that SSD might NOT be the right answer and using something 
Fusion-IO may be the better fit.  But Fusion-IO can be a driver 
nightmare (wish they'd open things up).

If you want arrays of SSDs on the cheap, you might look at 
PureStorage... (cheap being relative).