[ale] Source for Inexpensive, Quiet, Low-Power, rackmount server?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

"mike at trausch.us" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

>On 10/16/2012 06:45 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>>> BSD vs. Linux is more about footprint than raw speed.  Applications
>run
>>> > very similarly on both, IME.  I tend to use BSD when I have very
>small
>>> > things, or very old hardware, because it really shines there.
>> Note I said SSD, not BSD.  Thinking about a Solid State Disk (versus
>> spinning disk).  Any comments?
>> 
>> Thanks!
>
>Just keep an eye on it.
>
>My own experience with SSDs has been they either die very early, or
>they
>last as long as described.  Of course, this mirrors my experience with
>HDDs as well.
>
>They are *very* fast when it comes to random I/O.  I used one as the
>primary drive in my laptop for quite some time and I was very happy
>with
>it.  I haven't put one in a production deployment yet, though, as for
>those I need lots of space that is inexpensive, and SSDs don't quite
>fit
>that bill yet.  Though they're getting closer.  While the databases
>that
>I manage aren't huge, the file shares and email boxes I manage are
>absolutely astronomical by comparison (about 400 GB each and growing
>all
>the time).
>
>	--- Mike

I posted a summary of some SSD research I did here on the ALE board on 09/08/12.  The OP might find it useful.  You have to compare your average writes / day to the drive spec.  If you're under it's limit, the drive should last though the warranty period.  Some warranties essentially say we warrant this until you've written X amount of data, not for X amount of time.  Once you've reached the write limit of the storage cells, they can become more an more unreliable, until they presumably start garbling data.  I was unable to find definitive data on how these things fail at the end of their life.  Also, if the unit is powered off, and it cannot do it's data scrubbing, your data can fade away relatively quickly.  Probably not a problem with a server that's generally always on.

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
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