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Possible Duplicate:
HDD vs SSD durability

After reading Jeff Atwood's recent blog post on solid state drives, I'm somewhat deterred in wanting to own one. I basically want to use solid state drives in my home network for the following purposes (all machines running 64bit Linux):

  1. My main (pwn3r) desktop computer. This will be my main workstation for work, video encoding, etc. This will be running an Intel 980x 6-core processor, making it a beast. My hard disk configuration will be:
    • RAID-0: 2 Crucial 128GB Solid State drives for the main operating system(s), essentially providing 256GB of incredibly fast storage.
    • RAID-1: 2 WD 2TB Hard Disk drives for media and backup storage.
  2. My network firewall computer. This will be running Untangle on my home network for content filtering and firewalling (if that's a word). It will be running an Intel Atom D525 dual core 1.8GHz processor. The hard disk configuration will consist of a single small 16-32GB solid state drive for the operating system and little, if anything, else.
  3. My home HTTP/SFTP/file/backup server. This will be running a dual-core Intel i3 processor; it will be used for some video encoding, as a local DLNA server, a HTTP server for a few largely static files and perhaps some interactive scripts, a SSH server, possibly OpenVPN, and will be used to back up critical files over the network. It will be running RAID-X (where X > 0), meaning RAID-1 or RAID-5 or 6 for fast, redundant data storage, as well as a small SSD for the operating system.

I'm not exactly made of money, and I can't really count on buying four new SSDs every year or so. I can understand replacing them in computer number 1 once a year... maybe, but for the other computers which won't be utilizing the drive very much (ie: they're not power machines), it seems ridiculous to buy new drives this often.

My question is this: can I actually depend on solid state drives like I would on hard disk drives? Also, is this the best economic option? I'd like to save as much power and heat as I can, and solid state drives seem to be the best option at this point.

Community
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Naftuli Kay
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2 Answers2

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Intel drives are rated for 20GB a day for 5 years. I can't see how that is not good enough for serious use. http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/322296.pdf

pcunite
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I'm a but skeptical about those failure rates, no information is given about their usage patterns or operating environment. This is a more sensible take on SSD's:

Chaos Monkeys and SSDs

That said, I did make sure my Acronis disk image backup was working properly :)

Kev
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