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

By Kalint
in Hardware Hangout

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spudtrooper

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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.

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Kalint

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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.

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+LogicalApex MVC

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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.

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Aergan

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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.

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Dashel

Posted
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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.

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chconline Veteran

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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.

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UseLess

Posted
Posted

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

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f0rk_b0mb

Posted
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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

Experienced

+Byt Subscriber¹

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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.

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Ambroos

Posted
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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!)

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