Hmmmmmm. Never had a bad hardware RAID controller. Had several
mechanical hard drives go bad.
Anyone have an opinion(s) on SSD's in a small work group server?
We've had very good luck with SSDs (singly on workstations or spanned
volumes on servers) as primary storage mirroring to a spanned volume of
cheap spinning disks. Never had an SSD failure (yet), but the cheap disk
backup is live anyway so we're not too worried.
We *do* have a schedule for replacement based on the historical write
average on the SSDs, though. Eventually they will brick so before that
we have to replace them and planning it ahead of time is way better than
living in panic-replacement mode whenever they eventually die. At the
moment it looks like workstations won't even come close to needing
replacements before the systems are end-of-life anyway, but the servers
are a different issue (some of them are under considerable load, and
will probably require replacement every 2 years to be totally safe).
As for the OP's question about trim: trim is available as a mount option
as well as a few others that limit the tiny-write problem (like the
noatime option and putting various cache directories in tmpfs in RAM
instead of on disk, etc.) and change the way the seek/writes are
scheduled (default is optimized for platters, which is a deoptimization
for SSDs). You can find a wealth of information on the net about these
issues so I won't bore you with the details here.
