Rebuilding server: SSD or normal HD drive?

[IVB]

I need to rebuild my server (non-SageTV reasons, but its going on 4-5 years so I'm not hugely disappointed).

What are folks experience with SSDs on servers? Not terribly worried about cost, or power, the same machine has 7 1TB drives in it plus a bunch of other stuff.

Not sure if performance is really an issue on servers, although this same machine runs CQC, Picasa, DropBox, GoogleMusic Manager, SqueezeServer, a few other things.

If its relevant, I'm using WHS (the original version). I suppose I could upgrade to Windows V7, although i'm skittish of making changes to a working configuration.

[Jynxed]

I bought a $100 on an intel 40gb SSD to test about 2 years ago. I used it on my desktop for awhile then moved it into my HTPC.

I liked it enough I'm now on my 4th SSD and both my HTPC's have them also. I now almost never see the spinning circle. I also had some instances of lag when moving though cover art that went away. At today's prices I would say there is no reason not to.

If it is something you do make sure you avoid anything with a Sandforce controller. Which is used in about half the drives out there.

[SWKerr]

I went to a SSD 60GB awhile back and although it is not a huge performance boost to the server it was a noticeable improvement. Most of the disk hashing for recording still goes to the RAID drives but having the OS and Fanart on the SSD does make some thing faster.

I put a 60GB SSD on a older HTPC client as well and aside from the overall improvement in the noise lever it is incredibly fast to boot as well.

[Naylia]

I migrated to one too a couple years back. Just a 40GB OS drive on the server. Seems to speed up some image load times and network browsing on the extenders.

[jbrandon]

Two years ago I rebuilt my SageTV server and used a 64GB SSD and was so inpressed I convered all my machines over to SSD’s including my laptop. My SageTV server boots in 34 seconds, down from just over 4 minutes. Not sure what the life expecenty of the SSD’s us but I feel it was a very good move…

[IVB]

thanks for the replies. Interesting that Sage'rs have a generally good experience, but the same question on the cqc boards show generally bad experience.

[wayner]

I am another convert to SSDs. I don't see ever buying another physical hard drive except for storage on my server.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by wayner

I am another convert to SSDs. I don't see ever buying another physical hard drive except for storage on my server.

totally agree...
spinny drives still make great mass storage solutions...(for the moment)
but boot/use/etc SSD all the way...

actually the PCI attached SSD's look really cool...
like this:
OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 Max IOPS RVD3MIX2-FHPX4-960G PCI-E 960GB PCI-Express 2.0 x4 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Performance

• Max Sequential Read
  Up to 1900 MB/s
  
• Max Sequential Write
  Up to 1725 MB/s
  
• 4KB Random Write
  Up to 245,000 IOPS
  
• MTBF
  1,000,000 hours

now if only they could do something about the $$$ (well actually $$$$.$$ in this case)

[wayner]

I don't understand why SSDs are sold in a 2.5" form factor. Why don't we see more flash drives that are mSATA or Mini PCI-E. That allows you to make a really nice small HTPC system since some mobos now have these - such as the Zotac miniITX boards.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by wayner

I don't understand why SSDs are sold in a 2.5" form factor. Why don't we see more flash drives that are mSATA or Mini PCI-E. That allows you to make a really nice small HTPC system since some mobos now have these - such as the Zotac miniITX boards.

Because for most use case scenarios (e.g. laptops & desktops) the 2.5in form factor makes the most sense. You already need an adapter to put one in a desktop.

[wayner]

You can always use an adapter to go from smaller to bigger. But going from a bigger case to a smaller case is much trickier. The could sell it in a smaller form factor and just include the brackets to adapt to 2.5" or 3.5". The Mushkin SSD that I bought for my Sage server came with a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by wayner

I don't understand why SSDs are sold in a 2.5" form factor. Why don't we see more flash drives that are mSATA or Mini PCI-E. That allows you to make a really nice small HTPC system since some mobos now have these - such as the Zotac miniITX boards.

I would like to be able to pair a mini 40-60GB SSD (for the OS) with a traditional 320-500GB drive on a laptop computer. Replacing the traditional hard drive in my laptop with an equivalent size SSD would cost me more than I paid for the laptop. Seems like there would be a decent sized market for that type of performance gain.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

I would like to be able to pair a mini 40-60GB SSD (for the OS) with a traditional 320-500GB drive on a laptop computer. Replacing the traditional hard drive in my laptop with an equivalent size SSD would cost me more than I paid for the laptop. Seems like there would be a decent sized market for that type of performance gain.

You want to be careful RAIDing SSD's. There isn't really a performance benefit to be had and you lose TRIM which dramatically increases drive reliability. Some drives (I forget which) support TRIM in RAID, but there still isn't a performance benefit that makes it worth it.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

You want to be careful RAIDing SSD's. There isn't really a performance benefit to be had and you lose TRIM which dramatically increases drive reliability. Some drives (I forget which) support TRIM in RAID, but there still isn't a performance benefit that makes it worth it.

I'm not talking about RAID at all. All I'm saying is that upgrading most laptops to SSD technology today is an expensive proposition, due to the fact that there is only one 2.5" drive bay. The only relatively inexpensive way is to sacrifice drive space by purchasing a SSD that is smaller than the existing traditional drive. The option that I would be looking for is to be able to add a small mini SSD drive (like wayner described) in addition to the existing traditional drive. The mini SSD drive would be the C: boot drive with the OS, and the existing traditional drive could be a D: drive, with all of your data and any applications where speed is less of a concern. Pretty much just like most of us are setting up desktops these days, where we have the physical space for multiple drives.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

I'm not talking about RAID at all. All I'm saying is that upgrading most laptops to SSD technology today is an expensive proposition, due to the fact that there is only one 2.5" drive bay. The only relatively inexpensive way is to sacrifice drive space by purchasing a SSD that is smaller than the existing traditional drive. The option that I would be looking for is to be able to add a small mini SSD drive (like wayner described) in addition to the existing traditional drive. The mini SSD drive would be the C: boot drive with the OS, and the existing traditional drive could be a D: drive, with all of your data and any applications where speed is less of a concern. Pretty much just like most of us are setting up desktops these days, where we have the physical space for multiple drives.

Ah. Misunderstood. Sorry. They are getting cheaper and cheaper, but for the higher volume drives it is a little silly. 120gb is about the largest I'd get due to the cost. What is interesting are the hybrid hard drives.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

You want to be careful RAIDing SSD's. There isn't really a performance benefit to be had and you lose TRIM which dramatically increases drive reliability. Some drives (I forget which) support TRIM in RAID, but there still isn't a performance benefit that makes it worth it.

Probably not much benefit with SageTV specifically, but with other video editing apps and the likes that depend on heavy disk demand, the RAID-0 speed benefit is huge, SSD's tend to scale well. Most SSD's have an internal 'garbage collection' that cleans up similar to TRIM when it can't be passed by the RAID controller.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by IVB

I need to rebuild my server (non-SageTV reasons, but its going on 4-5 years so I'm not hugely disappointed).

One thing to watch out for is that SSDs can have utterly bizarre firmware bugs. I have a Crucial M4 SSD in my server, and I have mostly loved it. Then 2 weeks ago, my server started to crash every hour. It was like somebody yanked out the SSD. I finally found this gem on Crucial's web site:

"Corrects a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive".'

Once I updated the firmware, everything seemed to go back to normal. But I've never had that sort of thing happen with a rotational disk.

BTW, the drive is used for my root ("/") drive, and a ZFS L2Arc cache. This problem happened over night, and Sage successfully made several recordings while the main system drive was failed. I was pretty impressed with ZFS..

Drew

[Fuzzy]

An alternative to SSD is an extended drive cache. SuperCache is about $80, and with the extremely low cost of RAM, you can get pretty good performance out of a standard rotational disk (I run an 8GB cache on my server's system drive, which catches the entire sage folder, fanart, and pretty much anything else the system does. This method doesn't speed up boot times (irrelevant for a 24-hour system), but it is considerably FASTER than an SSD for runtime operation.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

An alternative to SSD is an extended drive cache. SuperCache is about $80, and with the extremely low cost of RAM, you can get pretty good performance out of a standard rotational disk (I run an 8GB cache on my server's system drive, which catches the entire sage folder, fanart, and pretty much anything else the system does. This method doesn't speed up boot times (irrelevant for a 24-hour system), but it is considerably FASTER than an SSD for runtime operation.

From SuperSpeed's website (makers of SuperCache):

SuperCache is not recommended for a boot volume (usually C).
Use only on non-boot data volumes.

I think it make sense if you have a good UPS only. Good idea in principle, but putting my Wiz.bin in a cache? Not worth the risk, my fanart directory only? Definitively Yes.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by routerunner

From SuperSpeed's website (makers of SuperCache):


I think it make sense if you have a good UPS only. Good idea in principle, but putting my Wiz.bin in a cache? Not worth the risk, my fanart directory only? Definitively Yes.

They have two modes of operation, write through, in which writes are direct to drive, or lazy write, where writes are cached. I leave lazy write disabled, which allows full operation of the read cache, without affecting write performance/safety (though I also have my whole system (and in fact, every computer in my house) on a very large commercial UPS.