Sup yall

Gotta build a dev server - and I am evaluating HDD's.

Will be used for some DB work, potentially running 2 VM's.

ATM I am weighing up the HDD options (Gotta be 1RU so RAID-1). 147GB SAS Drives and 120GB SSD Drives are virtually the same price, but I thought I would check a few peoples opinions on their reliability in an enterprise environment (taking MTBF with salt)

go sas.

nothing like em.

imo get 10krpm+ 2.5" sas drives
solid state isn't that s*** hot yet, we're only using it for an experimental thing which involves *a lot* of i/o

also you can now get 300gb 2.5" drives from hp

SSD on a database if you want the disk to die (or shrink the amount of usable space) within a few months. Unless you're doing basically only reads, go SAS.

and don't use vm's unless you're putting vmware on bare metal, you'll probably be very disappointed by the i/o

What do you mean by 'bare metal'?

I use VMs for testing software releases for OSs that I don't want to install. Plus using a VM for linux is better than say installing MinGW under Windows just so you can use a decent GCC/Code::Blocks dev env. Especially on Vista.

What do you mean by 'bare metal'?

I assume he means an ESX server.

SSD on a database if you want the disk to die (or shrink the amount of usable space) within a few months. Unless you're doing basically only reads, go SAS.

Rly? Some of the blogs I read about mysql, some of the guys have switched to using SSDs and are superstoked with them from a performance level. This is fairly recent tho and I haven't read any posts about failures yet, but I'm keeping an eye out to see how they go. Here's one post from one of the blogs - the performance increase is crazy. here's another - writes are, as you suggest, pretty average though.

What do you mean by 'bare metal'?



I assume he means an ESX server.

yeah
and even then I have no idea how it performs because I haven't tried it. surely it's a lot better though

all I know is that vmare server installed into windows and linux seems to suck at i/o. we've tried using it extensively for dev environments and even when a vm has a dedicated host, it's performance is abundantly worse than the exact same dev environment installed into the host directly. to the point where we've now ditched it in that context even though it means we lose the portability and ease of restore when the host fails. this is on enterprise-grade hardware with decent disks/controllers with plenty of battery-backed cache.

I use VMs for testing software releases for OSs that I don't want to install.

sure, but that may not be what jmr was talking about when he said 'dev server', especially given that he talked about databases as well.

Rly? Some of the blogs I read about mysql, some of the guys have switched to using SSDs and are superstoked with them from a performance level. This is fairly recent tho and I haven't read any posts about failures yet, but I'm keeping an eye out to see how they go. Here's one post from one of the blogs - the performance increase is crazy. here's another - writes are, as you suggest, pretty average though.

I don't debate at all that they're bloody quick - they are. I just question the integrity of any data that's stored on a device where you're doing frequent over-writes, and each block has a limited re-use life.

it depends on what 'limited' means

traditional hard disks will eventually be unable to read/write from/to their platters due to wear and tear, so why do you not question the integrity of data stored on them? so really, the only question in that regard is: does the expected lifetime of the media fit in with your lifecycle management plans?

also, it's entirely feasible that people are happy to change their plans in that regard simply due to the performance gains

Go with SAS.

Nothing to even discuss here, SAS. Without a doubt. When SSD is ready for the server environment you'll know about it.

Another vote for SAS here.

Also, ESXi 3.5 isn't bad, particularly on HP servers. Set up a test server the other day for SBS08 within ESXi 3.5. Good price for it too ;)

SAS indeed
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/7636/saspromo1lr2.jpg
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/saspromo1lr2.jpg/1/w448.png

When SSD is ready for the server environment you'll know about it.

I think you missed the boat dude ssd is being deployed, has been for months. it's absolutely ready, unless you're implying it's cost renders it unready