Solid state drives

[David Precious]

On Tuesday 20 April 2010 10:36:54 Simon Wilcox wrote:
> On 20/4/10 10:07, James Laver wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:08:10AM +0100, Richard Huxton wrote:
> >> Having said that, there are clearly plenty of applications where
> >> power-failure isn't an overriding worry.
> >
> > Or 'on any machine connected to a UPS that's correctly configured to
> > shut the machine down properly'?
> >
> > Or 'on any machine in a datacenter with generators for backup power'.
> 
> These are not the same. Ironically, in a datacentre with generators for
> backup power, you are MORE likely to experience sudden power loss than
> on a machine with a properly configured UPS.
> 
> The infrastructure of a commercial datacentre (e.g. Telehouse/HEX etc)
> rarely has the means to send shutdown commands to servers if any
> problems are experienced with the power feeds, meaning the UPSs will
> inevitably run out of power whilst the engineers run around in circles
> and you are unlikely to find out about it in time to do an orderly
> manual shutdown.

Or if a PSU goes bang and manages to trip out the supply to a rack...

(Yeah, ideally you'd be running a dual-PSU box with each PSU connected to a 
different supply, so you should never lose both, of course.)