MLC drives for small databases

ochadd

ochadd

[H]ard|Gawd
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I ran the IOmeter tests using the default access pattern with a 1GB file size, 16 outstanding IO, and ran for 5 minutes. Seems too good to be true. A single 120Gb OCZ vertex would replace three of my SQL servers and 12 drives in total including hot spares. So tempting.

The SATA drives are 160GB Western Digital YS drives. The SAS drives are 15k rpm 36GB Fujitsu. Three drive RAID 5 sets.

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I have the spreadsheet with the test results. The performance is unbelievable but I ran the tests many times and they always come back within a couple percent of each other.
 
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Get 4 of them and run RAID10 then youll be kicking.
 
Yup, they are amazing, but you might want to look into X25-E or X25-M's for something like this.
 
I'd love to do X25-E but they are just too expensive. The storage cost for even 100gb + room for growth is insane. 240gb RAID 10 setup using G.skill Falcon units come in under $1300 while a 192gb X25-e setup comes in @ $4800.

That doesn't include a hot-spare either. Intel units are in a different league.
 
Yeah the X25-E's are really really expensive, but the X25-M's aren't as bad. I mean, I love the Falcon in my machine but I have enough experience with heavy hitting databases to know that you might really really benefit from the improved random write speeds of the Intel drives.
 
Depending on how much writing is being done to your database, you may need to watch the lifespan of MLC drives. Also, the more free space in the array, the longer the device will last.

While I am a fan of the Vertex drives, if this is a mission critical database, you may want to consider at least the X25-M drives.

Don
 
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