SSD on a Small Business Server. Good idea or bad?


Recommended Posts

The SSD MTBF way surprasses the technological life of the device to be concerned with beating it up. They're just more expensive than needed so i would always recommend large drives for bulk storage.

Are you running SQL server on SBS? if so, it will love SSDs.. otherwise its just a cost measure.

The SSD MTBF way surprasses the technological life of the device to be concerned with beating it up. They're just more expensive than needed so i would always recommend large drives for bulk storage.

Are you running SQL server on SBS? if so, it will love SSDs.. otherwise its just a cost measure.

Yes there will be SQL Server to run my custom software and their Accounting DB.

Why would you need to do this? There is no need for the SSD on a SBS IMHO. Anything that is pushing that level of traffic should be broken out to specialized servers and optimized correctly there before you add SSDs for no reason.

Samsung 830 series has good options for overprovisioning despite being a desktop classed device. I've ran Server 2012 on mine for a week and performance for RDS/published apps was fantastic.

Yep, on my home server running Windows Server 2012, I have 2x Kingston V+200 120GB SSDs running in RAID 1. 1GB/s FTW!

How do you figure? That drive's spec is (read) 300/MBs so a RAID1 best case would give you 600MBs, if your interface and controller aren't the bottleneck which I'll wager they are.

I would go at least RAID10 if its production, I really question if RAID1 write performance will meet the IOPs needed by the SBS databases (unless you followed recommendations and moved SQL to a separate box).

120GB really isn't enough for a living SBS install either.

How do you figure? That drive's spec is (read) 300/MBs so a RAID1 best case would give you 600MBs, if your interface and controller aren't the bottleneck which I'll wager they are.

I would go at least RAID10 if its production, I really question if RAID1 write performance will meet the IOPs needed by the SBS databases (unless you followed recommendations and moved SQL to a separate box).

120GB really isn't enough for a living SBS install either.

The drive spec is over 500MB/s. It's SF-2281. RAID 1 is over 2 ports.

us4HJ.png

My $0.02.

How 'small' is small? Generally most work that a server will do isnt thrashing the HDD - a few file transfers, or a couple of database queries...nothing that you'll really notice scorching improvements from. If you're running some 10gigabit ethernet into your sever, and its serving 100 people...then yeah, fast storage is seriously great. (we have 10GbE at work, but the server is seriously slow so requests struggle/time out often)

The reason i very much DONT suggest SSDs for business is because they brick. If i WAS going to use them for business, I would RAID-1 them so when 1 bricks, there isn't any interruption to the server - swap it out and rebuild. Don't say it wont brick...it MIGHT not...but it can, and its not nice to have a business server come down in burning flames. No matter how you look at it, disaster prevention is infinitely better than disaster recovery. Ive reimaged an SBS server before...its slow and painful, and you do lose (a bit) of data between backups.

TLDR: If you MUST use an SSD - Set up disaster mitigation (RAID-1/10/5/6) as well as disaster recovery(image/backup) - one day you'll need it.

Hope it helps =)

Edit: Thanks mindovermaster...yes, i meant RAID-1. Stay away from RAID-0 like it's the proverbial plague =P

whys that?

Too many reads/writes on the drive could stress it and some drives don't use trim properly when they are in RAID 0. There are some companies like Intel that support it but it requires a series 7 mobo. See here: http://www.techspot.com/news/49811-intel-adds-trim-support-for-ssds-in-raid-0-7-series-motherboard-required.html

I have thought about doing this aswell for some client servers, 2xSSD's in RAID1 for the OS with 2x1TB Drives in RAID1 for the data.

I would be interested if anyone else has done this?

The only thing thats stopping me is when an SSD fails... its gone. But if a hard drive fails, it could be recoverable. Saying that though if you have regular backups this shouldnt be a problem! Just inconvenient.

I've been running two 64GB SSD's in RAID0 for about a year and a half, never had any issues and no performance degradation. I did synthetic and real-world benchmarks on the seperate drives and it's just way faster in RAID0. Nothing wrong with it (aside the fact that you seriously increase your failure rate, but that's not a problem for my personal laptop).

The fact that TRIM doesn't work isn't that big a deal at all. As long as your drive has decent garbage collection the advantages of TRIM aren't that high - not even remotely close to the performance gain from RAID0.

(Why did I start running in RAID0? It's the default config of my laptop. The Sony Vaio Z series always has either a 2x64GB, a 2x128GB, 4x64GB or 4x128GB RAID0 setup. Those 4x-RAID0's are blazing fast!)

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • I'm not unblocking my camera for this crapola. Sorry, Google.
    • Ummmm that is what is it supposed to do. Just turn if off in settings if you do not want it analyzing your open tabs. Chrome does the same thing with Gemini. Sarfari will do the samething after Apple's AI and even more so with the release of their 27 versions that is now powered by Googles LLM/ML models. Understanding why it is doing it and how it can help you vs jumping to some conspiracy theroy is a much better approach. As long as it can be turned off, all is good. Yes the default should be off but the a lot of people would never discover these features.
    • Just another reason (aside from many others) not to use Edge. Firefox 153.0b5 DEx64 has a similar feature added recently in prior builds that I will turn off at some point when I get around to it. It's the new "Something looks suspicious" page that pops up here and there. It cleverly hides itself between web pages that I've actually visited; as a result, you know, of selecting a web page and telling the browser where to go. The interesting thing is that it does not produce these warnings from pages that I, as the only intelligent user of the browser in my system, have ever directed the browser to open! What seems to be happening is that the browser looks at all the goofy ad links on a web page I do actually open and selects one that "looks suspicious" and then creates the "something looks suspicious" web page, which is neatly inserted, as mentioned, between web pages my RB ("real brain") has directed the browser to load in a session. The thing is, I usually look at links I am considering to follow before I ask the browser to load them, and in cases I have noticed where the link does indeed look suspicious, most of the time I will choose to not follow the link at all. Doesn't everyone do this or something similar? I am picky about what I voluntarily load... (I don't like links that start off fine, with a site designaiton that seems normal enough but then is followed by indecipherable alphanumeric strings many, many lines long, etc. I tend to reject those because they look suspicious. They may not be, but I don't care... I'll stay with Firefox, of course, if for no other reason than they usually let you turn off the junk you don't like. And because it isn't Edge... But at some point Microsoft will come to realize that putting your bookmarks on the left side is a Good Thing for a lot of people, just as Microsoft discovered when it had the bright idea of nailing the Windows taskbar to the bottom of the screen, when for decades Microsoft browsers had left that placement up to the user. They have finally reversed the obscenity of that decision. Finally.
    • Google was using the old CATPCHAs data to train their LLMs. What is the say they won't use this camera data of users to train their LLM? these companies need some strict regulations!
  • Recent Achievements

    • One Year In
      BA the Curmudgeon earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Conversation Starter
      rosiecharles earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • First Post
      KMilenkoski1202 earned a badge
      First Post
    • First Post
      carols23 earned a badge
      First Post
    • One Month Later
      Tom Willson earned a badge
      One Month Later
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      513
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      258
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      151
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      94
    5. 5
      macoman
      66
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!