Hi all

 

Is it possible or sensible to use an SSD as a data disk?

 

Since SSDs are getting pretty cheap, i think it would be nice to have some storage on faster SSDs which would be useful in many scenarios where access time lag is noticible, things like reading metadata and loading thumbnails of images etc, plus I'm sure there are many other scenarios which would benefit. Also I assume that "spinup" is almost immediate on an SSD?

 

I know SSDs can be used as the cache drive, but I would like the data to be protected as part of the array.

 

So questions:

Will it work?

Are SSDs reliable enough yet or am I asking for trouble adding it to the array? Will the risk of multiple drive failure effectively be significantly higher?

Is there issue with trim not being supported in reiserfs? would moving to another supported filesystem resolve this for data drives?

 

I have a Crucial BX100 250GB spare I am tempted to use for this purpose.

 

Another option i have considered is having the data on normal hdds in the array, but add the SSD (either as a cache or seperately mounted), and rsync the data to the SSD to keep in sync, then add an additional samba config for the SSD.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks, Jake

See here.

 

Also here and the rest of that thread.

Thanks for links, that's very helpful.

 

In summary it sounds like SSDs will work, however TRIM is not currently supported. So I can either wait until trim is supported, or rely on the SSD inbuilt garbage collection. The data wont change much and there will be alot of idle time, so will consider giving this a try.

 

To help mitigate risk, I assume there is no harm in running more frequent parity checks (say weekly), to check there are no parity corruption issues (as well as updating my offsite backup).