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Does SSD mitigate problems with multiple systems running on one "spindle"?

I

iroc409

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 17, 2006
Messages
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I am just curious, does the high speed of SSD drives in a virtual server mitigate the issues with SATA's poor multi-transaction performance?

In other words, if you have 3 systems installed on a single drive (say VMWare server, and the drive is formatted in the host's FS) performance will be reduced because multiple systems will access the disk at the same time.

Obviously, adding more drives or switching to SCSI (or both) would help eliminate it. But, for people not looking to spend that kind of money, would changing to an SSD help significantly? It seems that multiple systems (say 3, in my consideration) would still need to wait for the resource to be freed up--the fact that it is so much faster would require much less waiting.

Also, running one SSD vs three spinning drives would be far more power-efficient in a home setting.

Any experience here?
 
Personally, for home use, I'd just spend the same amount of money you might spend on an SSD and buy multiple larger physical spindles. It would take several years of increased electricity/cooling cost to overcome the price savings of using 2 1TB green drives ($116) as opposed to one 120 GB SSD ($169 with rebate)...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227543

I have all but one of my VMs at home hosted on one spindle with no issues.

Untangle gateway, 2k8r2 DC/DNS/DHCP server, 2k8r2 VPN/web/ftp/RDP gateway, Win 7 x32 box I use to make PE boot media and such

None of those is particularly disk intensive.

My Windows Home Server VM has 4 2 TB spindles assigned directly to it on the same virtual host.
 
To answer for the enterprise world: Yes, to a point. They have far higher IOPS than a traditional spindle, but they're not some kind of insta-solution disk (hint: a 10,000 desktop View deployment won't fit on 4 SSDs... ;))

For a small box? They'll make a pretty big difference, especially if the cache is good.
 
In the case I am thinking about, I would be running 2-4 systems that need very little for boot drives (or total usage). Untangle, pfsense/m0n0wall, WHS, and FreeBSD (for iSCSI). Except WHS, none require a large boot drive. Speed may or may not be necessity in the networking systems, which is why I ask about SSD.

I have oodles of hard drives around, including laptop drives. I should probably just stick with those, but it's worth asking. I'd hate to see a big reduction in network performance because machines are tripping over each other. I do need a few more storage drives for the planned array, so that's probably where I should put the money.

Edit: There would also be a host OS, which I was thinking all of which could go on a single SSD (using virtual drives instead of dedicated). Then I'd just need the storage array, and be done with it. Probably too much traffic for a spindle drive, but I guess I haven't tried it.
 
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