I love my consumer SSD backed database, but don't get visions of 380,000 IOPS on a real workload quite yet. Like any radical performance increase on just one co

I love my consumer SSD backed database, but don't get visions of 380,000 IOPS on a real workload quite yet. Like any radical performance increase on just one component it's more likely to just reveal a non-disk latency bottleneck somewhere else in your system. Be aware that the performance characteristics of flash are very unlike spinning disks, and vary widely between models. You will see things like weird stalls, wide latency variance, and write performance being all over the place during sustained operations and depending on disk fullness. I chose Intel 520s because they performed better on MySqlPerformanceBlog benchmarks than the then-current Samsung offering [1] and because of OCZ's awful rep [2]. I hit about 5K write IOPS spread across two SSDs before my load becomes CPU-bound, which is nowhere near benchmark numbers but pretty sweet for a sub-$1k disk investment. It's also my understanding that non-server flash drives like recommended by the article do not obey fsync and are suspect from a ACID standpoint. RAID mirroring does not fix this--if integrity across sudden power loss is critical you might not be able to use these at all and will have to find a more expensive server SSD. [1] http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/04/25/testing-samsung-ssd-sata-256gb-830-not-all-ssd-created-equal/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/04/25/testing-samsu... [2] http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-... p.s. the RAM benefits the article mentions are real and potentially huge. My query and insert performance has gone from having heavy RAM scalability issues to it hardly mattering at all. This is all on MariaDB on a non-virtualized server; I'm looking forward to better SSD-tuned databases in the future doing even better.