microSD card as cache in a server system

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qhash

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 25, 2011
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110
Hi,
anyone found and has experience with using a microSD model card capable of wirting 20MB/s 24/7 5yrs?
 
I'm not sure what benefit it would be. A cache is supposed to be a small but fast storage area for commonly accessed data. And SD card is almost certainly going to be slower than the system you're trying to cache and woudl do nothing but slow things down for you.
 
qhash said:
Hi,
anyone found and has experience with using a microSD model card capable of wirting 20MB/s 24/7 5yrs?
Click to expand...

About the only thing I've found capable of standing up to that kind of abuse are quality CF cards. I've often used them as replacements for hard drives in different types of equipment. But of course, they are much slower than cheap SSDs. The only reason to use them is when you need interfaces to IDE or PCMCIA specs. Otherwise, I just use MSATA SSD's with the appropriate tiny adapter.
 
not a good idea at all. They aren't built for that kind of abuse and small write performance even on the best of them is hideous compared to ssd. Just use an ssd.
 
You're asking for 3PB+ endurance on a MicroSD card. Most consumer SSDs can't even do that. Industrial MicroSD cards are rated for ~250TB, and that's using SLC NAND, so, what you want doesn't exist.
 
thats what I was afraid. the problem is we need to build a small server that has only two 3,5" slots for HDDs and they must be filled with 6 TB drives. I guess similiar thing to the microSD situation will be with USB sticks..
 
qhash said:
thats what I was afraid. the problem is we need to build a small server that has only two 3,5" slots for HDDs and they must be filled with 6 TB drives. I guess similiar thing to the microSD situation will be with USB sticks..
Click to expand...

No flash memory is that durable. USB sticks won't even get close. If you have a sata port open then get an msata drive with a small SATA adapter for the least possible internal space. If you do not, msata to USB 3 is the smallest possible solution I am aware of that has reasonable durability. Though as I said I've replaced IDE hard disks with CF flash, but never something that needed to write that much data on a continual basis as you are describing.
 
I did something related some time back.

I wanted to combine the speeds of several 3G connections into one, using a software, and it required an SD card to buffer/combine the data from the several connections before saving it to the final storage.

Anyway, the SD cards normally lasted about 4-8 days, and the writes weren't that high. After 4 failures I gave up.
 
does it have a external USB 3 port? if so a small SSD in an enclosure will work.
 
The idea behind those in servers these days is to be cheap storage, easily replaceable for headless host OS such as ESXi or Hyper-V nano where the VMs are stored on much more expensive devices and arrays. These OS versions don't undergo 24/7 writing so I'm wondering what application you are curious about that does :D
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
does it have a external USB 3 port? if so a small SSD in an enclosure will work.
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And will suck for cache, External devices over USB are good for data going one way at a time.

Can you not add in a raid card with external ports to add more storage...

Sounds like this was poor planning on the server side...
 
PliotronX said:
The idea behind those in servers these days is to be cheap storage, easily replaceable for headless host OS such as ESXi or Hyper-V nano where the VMs are stored on much more expensive devices and arrays. These OS versions don't undergo 24/7 writing so I'm wondering what application you are curious about that does :D
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Not 100% true, people are / should be moving away from expensive SANS in many scenerarios short of large scale enterprise, and using local storage which is cheaper and faster in a set up such as a VSAN or starwind for example.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Not 100% true, people are / should be moving away from expensive SANS in many scenerarios short of large scale enterprise, and using local storage which is cheaper and faster in a set up such as a VSAN or starwind for example.
Click to expand...
Which is why I explicitly mentioned SD for just the OS of the hosts that utilize the faster storage for VMs that are running the production servers. The host OS (to clarify: bare metal) does not need to be blazing fast at all so it makes sense not to waste resources on it.
 
PliotronX said:
Which is why I explicitly mentioned SD for just the OS of the hosts that utilize the faster storage for VMs that are running the production servers. The host OS (to clarify: bare metal) does not need to be blazing fast at all so it makes sense not to waste resources on it.
Click to expand...

MicroSD or USB stick for the ESXi is a good idea. Speaking about Windows Servers, I would recommend you installing it on SataDOM or on RAID array. As for cache, as mentioned, it is better to use server side caching (e.g. cachecade on the RAID controller using SSDs or Software-Defined cache again using SSDs). Starwind was mentioned, as far as I know, their Virtual SAN has SSD cache, which could be helpful. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/caching-page
 
Any chance a motherboard with m.2 fits within the design envelope? Some of the m.2 NVMe drives have endurance in the range of 2.5TB/dollar (helps to make a spreadsheet comparing stated endurance divided by price, if those are the driving design parameters)
 
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