Intel SSDs that may not suck

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Today is the launch of Intel's 3rd generation SSD line, the 320 series. And they've finally produced a cheap consumer product that may be useful for databases, too! They've put 6 small capacitors onto the board and added logic to flush the write cache if the power drops. The cache on these was never very big, so they were able to avoid needing one of the big super-capacitors instead. Having 6 little ones is probably a net reliability win over the single point of failure, too.

Performance is only a little better than earlier generation designs, which means they're still behind the OCZ Vertex controllers that have been recommended on this list. I haven't really been hearing good things about long-term reliability of OCZ's designs anyway, so glad to have an alternative. *Important*: don't buy SSD for important data without also having a good redundancy/backup plan. As relatively new technology they do still have a pretty high failure rate. Make sure you budget for two drives and make multiple copies of your data.

Anyway, the new Intel drivers fast enough for most things, though, and are going to be very inexpensive. See http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_320_review_300gb for some simulated database tests. There's more about the internals at http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review and the white paper about the capacitors is at http://newsroom.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/38-4324/Intel_SSD_320_Series_Enhance_Power_Loss_Technology_Brief.pdf

Some may still find these two cheap for enterprise use, given the use of MLC limits how much activity these drives can handle. But it's great to have a new option for lower budget system that can tolerate some risk there.

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Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us
"PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books


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