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Flash is really great in theory, but in my experience with intel and sandforce controllers, it isn't reliable enough. I've bought 2 flash drives and had 4 fail
by nirvana 14y ago
Flash is really great in theory, but in my experience with intel and sandforce controllers, it isn't reliable enough. I've bought 2 flash drives and had 4 failures already.
I've seen both drive controllers get themselves wedged to the point where they just shut down and go dead. This happens because they aren't doing a straight 1-1 mapping and along with wear leveling (which is necessary) they're trying to compress (sandforce) and optimize (intel) the way data is stored but their algorithms are too complex to be fully debugged (as of last year, anyway.)
I've gone back to spinning rust as a result. I'd love to move my servers to flash, but not until they go back to really straightforward controllers (I hear the samsung controllers are very reliable, and this is why Apple chose them for their laptops) and don't do anything more than wear leveling.
For performance in servers, I'm going with a lot of RAM.
Right now the drive failure rates of SSDs are way too high in my experience, and reading between the lines and user reviews on retailer sites it seems that my experience is not unusual.
- pivo 14y agoJust curious (and I haven't really used any SSDs yet) if your drive failure experience is with consumer or "Enterprise" SSDs? I'd expect that the enterprise versions would be more resilient but I don't know.
- corin_ 14y agoThey key aspects for Enterprise drives (both disks and SSDs) are generally 1.) Performance and 2.) When you buy them they come from seperate batches (i.e. a single failure doesn't indicate more are likely to follow). Servers should basically be created to cope with drive failure in such a way that % of failure isn't an impact on "will this cause problems" but merely on working out the cost of using them.
- reeses 14y agoActually, the key difference with "enterprise" SSD is that they overprovision the drive to have a cell reserve. That's why you can buy a 512Go consumer drive or a 480Go enterprise drive. As cells get wonky, they are 'replaced' from the reserve.
- michaelcampbell 14y agoPurely as an anecdotal data point, I'm a developer so due to constant compiling and other side-effects of my position, I suspect I work my SSD's harder on the write side than average. Using consumer grade SSD's I haven't had any more failures than I did with platters.
- rtkwe 14y agoAnecdotal evidence is anecdotal I know, but I've had no issues with my laptop SSD, an Intel 320 Series iirc. At first I was really worried, which drove me to backup properly for the first time, but almost a year in I've had no issues with it at all.
- corin_ 14y agoThey're getting better and better, really fast. Still not quite reliable enough that I've started suggesting to family and friends that they move to SSDs, and if I had to pay for them I'm not sure I would have bothered moving yet (though I haven't personally had a problem in quite some time now), but they're getting there, and quickly.