Production databases on SSDs?

[Richard Huxton]

Ovid wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----
> 
>> From: Chris Jack <chris_jack at msn.com>
> 
>> Be aware that there is a major difference between the reliability
>> and cost of the pen drives you get on the high street and
>> production quality solid state drives. Your minimal cost comment
>> worries me.
> 
> I only meant "minimal cost" in relation to setting up a bunch of
> master/slave mysql servers, configuring them, getting replication
> going, etc.

Have a search through the PostgreSQL mailing-list archives for various
discussions. Like Elizabeth mentioned, transaction logs* can be a good
choice, as are mostly-read indexes of course. Recent MySQL supports
tablespaces, but I don't know if you can just put an index on a
table-space or you have to move your whole table + all its indexes onto
it. If your disks are spending most of their time seeking rather than
reading data it's a win.

I don't think there's any useful data about reliability yet, just
because most models aren't that old. The performance degradation issues
that got widely reported on the Intel drives suggests there is still a
lot to learn about these things.

* - it's not the transaction logs themselves that are the problem so
much as having constant small writes to them causing the disk heads to
seek back and fore. This is why you tend to put them on their own disks.

-- 
  Richard Huxton
  Archonet Ltd