Lot of details you need to fill in. 50 user production server doing what? File share, large or lots of small files? SQL server, OLAP or OLTP loads? Then there's the technology of the SSD drives. Not just the MLC/SLC tech but drives with brains that can handle raid configurations. If you look closely at disk I/O on SSD's most of the high end drives top out at the 240GB level. Larger drives can start to decrease in performance. Given it's still faster than traditional drives but is the $/GB worth it to you. You didn't mention how much space you needed. How high end is your controller and does its HCL have specific SSD's on it? I'm just guessing that SSD's may be overkill for that you are talking about. Will the users really see improvements in their interactions with the server? They won't care if the server takes 20 seconds to boot or 2 minutes.
That being said I love to jump on the newest tech out there and see what it can do. But I've learned my lessons to never put something in production I don't fully understand. I've been messing with SSD's for years, mainly using them in equipment in hostel environments. The early cheap MLC drives I used tended to fail quite often. I've hardly had any issues with new high end SLC drives other than older SATA controllers not liking them. I boot my ESX hosts from them at home for power savings (guests are on my QNAP). Have a few laptops and desktops and they all work great. I've tested putting a single high end OCZ SSD in my QNAP and running a virtual guest off it. In my case performance test showed about a 25% improvement in guest disk I/O vs the Equallogic array it was on before. But even that is comparing apples to oranges. ________________________________ From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 9:17 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SSD and 2008 R2 Hyper-V, SAS vs. SATA SSD Some of you may remember I fought a little with putting an SSD drive in my old home lab PowerEdge 840 but I did finally get it to work. I've been running 2008 R2 Hyper-V server on SSD for about a week now and all I can say is holy crap! The boot times (compared to the previous platter SATA drives) are insane. I had no idea a server OS could boot so fast! I haven't timed it, but I'd guess it's less than 10 seconds from the end of POST to me being able to RDP to it. My question is....for a 50-user production server which would be faster - SAS or SATA SSD for the OS? Something I find little discussion on in the controller architecture (SATA SSD's vs. SAS disks) and performance with varying levels concurrent client connections. SATA drives now have NCQ, does this negate/mitigate the traditional SCSI advantage? David Lum Sr. Systems Engineer // NWEATM Office 503.548.5229 // Cell (voice/text) 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
