Would you put a swap partition on SSD?  Possibly, but not alongside critical data.

 

I've read this is the perfect application for SSD's as it provides very rapid random access.

 

Perhaps, but since swap space doesn't need to be non-volatile (unless the machine goes into a sleep state, where the drives are powered down) ....

Anyway, the money spent on the SSD might be better spent on additional ram!

 

Oh, and I did say 'but not alongside critical data.'

Sure, there is a demand for SSD based servers. If you were to build an SSD server for fast access (teaming of say 4 or 6 gigE network ports?) then it could be worth the extra expense of SSD for the speed increase, assuming you have multiple concurrent users. Honestly, I'm not really that involved in networking or enterprise servers but any enterprise SSD sever will be a lot more capable than an unRAID server. So, yes I see a demand for SSD servers but I see very little point in an unRAID SSD server.

 

Today, SSD's are simply not better for creating a cheap, high capacity, home based media server. SSD's have great application opportunities but the home media server is not one of them.

 

Peter

Would you put a swap partition on SSD?  Possibly, but not alongside critical data.

 

I've read this is the perfect application for SSD's as it provides very rapid random access.

 

Perhaps, but since swap space doesn't need to be non-volatile (unless the machine goes into a sleep state, where the drives are powered down) ....

Anyway, the money spent on the SSD might be better spent on additional ram!

 

Oh, and I did say 'but not alongside critical data.'

 

Money spent for swap or ram is always better for ram, providing your architecture supports it or you do not require virtual memory that exceeds ram by large amounts. I've seen applications requiring 128GB of ram for huge in memory multidimensional matrix calculations.

 

For the record, your lack of confidence in SSD's is noted.

 

I thought I would have trouble with the 2 VMware virtual filesystems being pounded on an older OCZ SSD.

These are two virtual windows machines that are running 24x7, so there are sectors being decommissioned constantly, all day long. I've not had an issue with these after 2 years.

It's been noted that you can write 20GB of data a day and an SSD would last 5 years.

I see a demand for SSD servers but I see very little point in an unRAID SSD server.

 

Today, SSD's are simply not better for creating a cheap, high capacity, home based media server. SSD's have great application opportunities but the home media server is not one of them.

 

Agreed, but it would still be cool. Where unRAID does provide a benefit is in a single flat storage view of multiple SSD's with protection should one of the SSD's fail.

I see a demand for SSD servers but I see very little point in an unRAID SSD server.

 

Today, SSD's are simply not better for creating a cheap, high capacity, home based media server. SSD's have great application opportunities but the home media server is not one of them.

 

Agreed, but it would still be cool. Where unRAID does provide a benefit is in a single flat storage view of multiple SSD's with protection should one of the SSD's fail.

 

Right.  It is pretty obvious that an SSD based server won't be able to compete with a HDD based server in terms of capacity in the short term.  I don't think this will be true forever, but for at least the next few years it will be.  However, capacity isn't the only reason one might want a server.  There are a lot of other applications for which performance is more important that capacity, yet you still want your data protected against drive failure.

 

Also, I never said the SSD server would run unRAID

Also, I never said the SSD server would run unRAID

 

Mine would!

 

In my particular case, I could use a SSD server to house the many many source files or the dovecot email archive folders. Since these are many small files it would probably be good on an SSD drive.

Currently I put them in a hidden folder on my cache drive.

Then use NFS to automount the folders from unRAID.

I'm planning to put these on SSD so that I don't have to wait for spin up times.

However, I don't want it as part of the protected array right now since that will cause spin up of the parity drive.

I'll resort to using rsync in dated directories with the --link-dest option to keep archival backups.