Topic: What is the latest opinion about SME on a solid state drive?

[LANMonkey]

A quick search shows that Dell, for example, makes the argument for solid state drives being applied to servers.  Does anyone have any experience and/or recommendations for solid state drives with SME server?

[purvis]

I have one server running in production with two identical intel 520 drives running in raid 1 mode.
Make sure your drive does not go over 75 percent usage.
They kick butt.
I do not think you want them if a hard drive is running without a some moments of pause.
I do not know how to pause the bootup process of linux but if you are going to be rebooting often.
I would nice to have about 45 seconds of no disk activity during boot up to let the drives do some sdd maintenance.

SME has a lot of logs constantly running.
If you can, you can also set the disk writeback to more than 5 seconds.
This would possibly allow for more data to fill blocks with one action.
If you could format the disk at a different boundary, that would help too.
I think all disk formating in the future should format on sector boundaries to those that SSD run well with.

I personally would think about only buying INTEL SSD's right now.
Centos 6 does support Trim.  Trim is helpful but not the most important thing.
If you have a lot(great many) small(tinly) files or changes of databases in a very large number. You might want to stick with non SSD.
Some of my most slowest performance is in the network with SMB and SAMBA protocol and how some programs are written to not preform well over a network. Basically making small writes and reads like a poor performance sort routine where opportunistic file locking is turned off due to file sharing.

[LANMonkey]

That is very helpful.  I am encouraged to look into this.

I have an old Dell Optiplex desktop that uses only a laptop sized hard drive.  I used this computer as a server for a while and the tiny little hard drive burned out.  My impression of solid state drives is that they are all this size and I would like to use this little desktop again as a server.  My server doesn't get too much traffic and whatever limitations I have to cope with in the change of technology are not as likely to be critical in my application.

[Stefano]

SME8 comes from Centos 5.X.. you all should search info about Centos5 and ssd.. AFAIR, Centos5 doesn't support fully all ssd features, so be carefull

[LANMonkey]

SME8 comes from Centos 5.X.. you all should search info about Centos5 and ssd.. AFAIR, Centos5 doesn't support fully all ssd features, so be carefull

I am not really interested in going too in-depth into how the solid state hard drive is being managed by Linux.  I know that storage options and hard drive options can get pretty deep in Linux.  I was hoping I could just replace a ceramic drive with a solid state drive and the installation would be completely transparent.  After that, mostly I'm concerned about reliability.

I know that laptops are increasingly using solid state drives.  How about desktop clients?  Are we seeing more solid state drives there?

[Stefano]

I was hoping I could just replace a ceramic drive with a solid state drive and the installation would be completely transparent.

it will, AFAIK

  After that, mostly I'm concerned about reliability.

and that's why you should know HOW Centos5/SME8 manage ssds

[janet]

LANMonkey

Does anyone have any experience and/or recommendations for solid state drives with SME server?

This has been answered recently (last few months or so) in the forums & I think there was also something in bugzilla (??).
Search forums on SSD, but it appears there is only very limited support on Centos 5.x (which sme8 is based on), & only certain drives are supported.
It seems there is much better support for SSD's is in Centos6.x, which sme9 is based on, so IMO you would be better to wait until sme9 if you have the attitude that you can just buy any SSD drive & plug it in & expect it will work without issues.

So instead of glossing over the technicalities you REALLY DO need to do your research before purchasing & using SSD devices with sme8.x.
There were some answers in the forums posts mentioned, so start reading.

[LANMonkey]

Thanks mary.  That's just what I wanted to hear.  I did browse "solid state drive" and didn't find much.  I'll try "ssd" instead.

[purvis]

I have only purchased the INTEL stuff. After reading about other SSD firmware issues, i am not into experimenting with the lower cost drives.
I will let somebody else do that. I have experimented with enough failed stuff over my life time.
I believe if you have a computer that is  in a kind of standard system. The Intel should work fine.
Actually on the 520 drives, Intel has not changed the firmware any.
The SSD drives do  not have any heat that i can tell and no vibration.
I am running SSD drives in windows 2000 and apple snow leopard. No issues at all.
There is software called trim enabler for snow leopard. I have no idea if is even working, but i have it loaded.
I also have SSD on some window XP machines and I rarely run the Trim command.
But like i said, do not  load the SSD drive's capacity with too  much files. Give it some room to do it's internal maintenance.
I would not by anything less than the 240 drives. Mine are 80, 120 and 180. But there is a newer INTEL 240g MODEL 520.

[LANMonkey]

Thanks purvis, I'll keep your advice in mind.