(Complete) MTA Server Upgrade: OS from live to SSD based

[zog]

Writing to an SSD consists of a delete then a write, over time this wares down the cells in the SSD (they're notorious for not lasting long), if you're treating the SSD as RAM, it's performing many read/writes all the time and will ware down your SSD faster then it would do with normal use.

I'm coming late to the party here but apparently the "not lasting long" meme is more a rumour, than fact, unless you have first hand evidence of SSDs crapping out?

I've actually had 3 SSDs die on me, but they were the older crappy jmicro controller based ones deployed as a cache (being _written_ to 24/7 non stop, continously) for 3 to 6 months - SUPER TALENT brand. Luckily SSD tech has moved on and hopefully these are now obsolete. Pricier intel brand ones deployed the same took this load in their stride, and appear to have a MTBF 10 times greater than spinners even taking into account the wear levelling.
Thats subjecting the drives to a load level that would also kill a lot of normal hard drives.

I'd be quite confident sticking Intel brand SSDs into important stuff.. though I might RAID1 them and get ones from different batches just for peace of mind if it was real important.

edit - I got 3 PCs with swap on SSD, 2 x Intel, 1 x SUPER TALENT, all running 32 bit Xubuntu Linux with 1G, 2G and 4G RAM respectively, be interesting to see how they cope over time.

Running "vmstat 300" (300 second update interval) and monitoring the "si" and "so" columns will indicate how hard the box is hitting the swap over time to see if we need to care about this anyway.

[JabbaTheSlut]

I'm not a fan of solid state drives, Stop being a cheapskate and buy a cheap HDD.
Every single USB stick, SSD, I've had has become corrupt or unustable after a while. Spinney disk FTW.
I do SSD OS rebuilds regularly and it will work fine for about a month, then I need a new SSD issued due to problems (failed builds, Corrupt settings yadayada) . It could be a shit build, but meh, I'm only going by what i'm used too.

[[DRuG]NikT]

I have SSDs in all my systems, including roughly 100 exec's laptops at work - these are the users that demand high speed and have a critical need for the config to be precisely correct for their VPN/remote networking to function properly. If they were having problems like this, I'd know about it - instead, these are the fastest machines on site.

+1 for Zog's experience.

And "cheapskate"??? They cost way more than a hard disk?!

I suspect the corruptions you are seeing are because these are military machines, where the users know if they have problems, there's a chance they'll get a new system/rebuild? I've known users that have deliberately corrupted things to get their box updated.

[zog]

I'm not a fan of solid state drives, Stop being a cheapskate and buy a cheap HDD.
Every single USB stick, SSD, I've had has become corrupt or unustable after a while. Spinney disk FTW.
I do SSD OS rebuilds regularly and it will work fine for about a month, then I need a new SSD issued due to problems (failed builds, Corrupt settings yadayada) . It could be a shit build, but meh, I'm only going by what i'm used too.

USB stick != SSD drive. And sticking to Intel brand SSDs is hardly being cheapskate as Nik mentions!
http://www.scorptec.com.au/computer/393 ... 2mh160g2k5
sounds like you were using the older gen cheapy ones which did have problems with stuttering after sustained use, hard to say without any specific details.