I use spinning-drive storage media ...
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Not mature enough yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not mature enough yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Solid state is all right in certain circumstances, but I always treat it as a suspect drive about to fail.
Me, I treat all media as about to fail. Professionally, I've spent many a happy year backing up from one media type to another just in case I was right. Once or twice I have been.
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Me: all your hard drive is about to fail.
You: I know, they are always about to fail.
Me: No I mean your drives and optical discs are all about to burn in a fire.
You: How is this different than any other time?
Really? I think what you mean is that you treat all media as if it *could* fail at any time, and hopefully not simultaneously. If I treated all media as if it was about to fail, I would spend all my time driving to Fry's to buy more hard drives until I ran out of money.
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It is always good to test media and test restores as well.
For example, I thought a program (Paperbak) that printed out binary files with ECC would be the answer because paper tends to be a resilient medium. Boy, was I wrong. I never could get scans to ever work with that program, no matter what DPI and ECC combinations I used.
I think there is still a niche for a program that can print out binary files with ECC. It is always good to use different medium types anyway, because invariably, one will fail.
It w
Re: Not mature enough yet (Score:2)
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Storage media have lifespans.
Try putting one of my Apple II+ floppies in a floppy drive - if you have one that can read it.
Or my old decks of System/36 punch cards.
Actually, the latter are still readable.
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Dunno about my ][e floppies since I don't have anything that read those, but my C64 floppies seem to be fine after about 25-30 years. But then again, density is so low you can almost see the sectors themselves.
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> Me, I treat all media as about to fail.
That's a whole lot easier when you haven't 10x more for the media.
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SSD is very useful, but because it can't be recovered like a spinning disk with a clean room, there has to be more of a focus on backups.
What might be ideal would be a hard disk controller card that can do RAID 1, but asynchronously. This way, the writes hit the SSD and go on, while being buffered to the HDD to write when it gets around to it. Of course, there would have to be something for consistency (a large battery backed up RAM buffer that will block the I/O on the SSD when it fills up), but this mig
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Windows 7 has a rudimentary backup method, a subset of wbadmin. It is good for taking images and then saving files aside, but it isn't that great, especially compared to Time Machine.
CrashPlan is useful, but offsite storage plans can get expensive ($100/month/terabyte.) For archiving (where one can wait a few hours), Amazon Glacier is $10 a month, but even that can get pricy.
Backup-wise, the only OS I can't back up as an image with the operating system are Linux distros. I can always go in with CloneZill
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The failure rate of SSDs is a third of that of HDDs and HDDs can also fail catastrophically. It surprises me that anyone would run a PC without an SSD as their OS driver, the speed difference is night and day.
Spinning Storage Media: (Score:5, Funny)
I think this is when I forget to take the notes to myself out of my pants pocket before washing them.
Data permanence is a bit lacking.
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Why do you have to wash the notes you write to yourself? Are they dirty notes? ;^)
Re:Spinning Storage Media: (Score:5, Funny)
Just cleaning out /tmp. :)
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I disassembled one that quit working and had to resolder the flash chip due to stress cracking. I did fix that. Then I reinforced the USB connector with solder and metal filled epoxy (inert). Then I cast fumed silica bearing epoxy around it in a custom mold. With a silicone rubber cap it will survive 8 hours in salt water at 3x seawater salt concentration. It also survived 8 hours in soda. It survived a 4 story drop to concrete. I ran over it with my car. It is still working after a year.
Spinning, and lots of it. (Score:3)
Anything can fail so redundancy is key. Luckily, storage gets cheaper as my needs get greater. I now have most of my stuff on a pair of manually-mirrored 4 TB drives, recently purchased for $160 each. (Yeah, I'm a little compulsive about ripping media. But always carrying a phone that shoots multi-MB pictures and 1080 video eats space fast, too.)
The only solid-state storage I have is in mobile devices. (And I still have my old disk-based iPod, dag nabbit.)
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Anything can fail so redundancy is key. Luckily, storage gets cheaper as my needs get greater. I now have most of my stuff on a pair of manually-mirrored 4 TB drives, recently purchased for $160 each. (Yeah, I'm a little compulsive about ripping media. But always carrying a phone that shoots multi-MB pictures and 1080 video eats space fast, too.)
The only solid-state storage I have is in mobile devices. (And I still have my old disk-based iPod, dag nabbit.)
Same here. I have two 4TB drives for images and then several drives of smaller size, maybe 14TB total. Then I have several usb sticks, some sdcards, ipods, and all those combined are maybe around 100GB. Solid state is for temporary use, until it's transferred to my laptop.
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Microdrive was really a tiny hard drive :^). An 1" inch HDD, I think. The slot it plugs into is named Compact Flash, but that's just a name and CF is actually a variant of IDE.
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"More"? (Score:3)
"More" as in "I have more data on it"? Or "More" as in "I use that storage medium more often"? Nowadays, most people use SSDs more often than spinning disks, on their tablets/smartphones; but they're more likely to have much more data on spinning media.
SSD for gigabytes, HDD for terabytes (Score:3)
I have a rather substantial video game collection, as well as smaller but still non-trivial music and video collections. Storing it all on SSDs would cost me somewhere between two and three thousand dollars. And so I keep very few games on them - only those that really suffer from loading times (Skyrim, Far Cry 3/Blood Dragon, Civ 5, BF2 and UT3). Everything else is going on spinning rust, along with my user folders.
Both of my main computers (primary desktop and laptop) have an SSD for the OS and for most programs (180GB and 120GB, respectively). They are coupled with high-speed hard drives for games and media storage (2TB and 750GB, respectively, although the desktop has another 2TB in various smaller drives).
I'm not sure how to measure which is "used more". By capacity, it's clearly hard drives. However, by I/O usage, the SSDs might win out.
Would I one day like to use pure solid-state? I think so. Adding the SSDs is the single biggest performance improvement I've ever done, and the power and noise decrease is nice. But I don't see it being cost-effective for me for at least another three or four years.
Both more or less equally (Score:2)
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Similar here. I found the performance of the RAIDz array smoothed out with a SSD ZIL drive. (Not the cache, the write-ahead log. The cache increased best-case performance, ZIL helped worst-case.) Most of even my tablet/laptop usage pulls data off the server, but the SSD boot drive on the desktop was a massive speedup, even if I mount the user data via NFS.
Got $? (Score:2)
I wish I could afford to put all my data on SSDs.
As I cannot afford that, / is on a SSD and /home is on a convention HDD.
I would use a hybrid setup (where the SSD would just be a large cache for the HDD) if Ubuntu/Mint had an idiot-proof way of setting that up that would persist the next time I installed a new OS.
Define "use" (Score:2)
Mostly spinning discs (Score:2)
but I've got a few USB sticks lying about.
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So, you dont understand the risks of a RAID5/RAID1 rebuild on modern media then, I see.
they are considering supporting triple parity raid these days.
The risk of failure-on-rebuild meant raid-5 was dead years ago for anyone who actually wants
reliability.
Hybrid drives anyone..? (Score:2)
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I've been thinking about getting one of those, but a mere 8GB cache seems inadequate. Does anyone with experience of these care to comment?
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I replaced the drive in my 5-year old laptop a few months ago with such a drive from Seagate. The hybrid was only about 15% more than a conventional drive of the same capacity. Doubling my disk space in the upgrade was nice. Going from a 5400 rpm to a 7200 rpm drive (at less power draw) was also very nice. Having the large flash cache has helped just about everythin
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I have a seagate momentus XT 500GB which I think has a 4GB cache. I've been using it for a year or two, and just noticed that smartctl says:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 092 092 099 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 8
so I guess it's worn out already and not using the cache anymore, assuming i'm reading that correctly.
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--If I were you, I'd contact support and see if you can RMA it if that message really means that it's failing already; it should still be under warranty.
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Haven't had any HHD failures lately. (Score:2)
When I have a hard drive fail, I will think about replacing it with SSD. But I'm not going to spend money on them just to have bragging rights about boot time.
One of my customers just bought a new custom built server, with HDDs for the data storage, mirrored 2TB drives. The OS drive is two 120GB SSD drives. Two months after buying it, one of the SSDs died, and messed up the image of the other preventing it from booting. Had to get the replacement drive from the guy who built it and reload Windows Server fr
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Most of us who use SSDs are willing to sacrifice reliability and storage space for speed. I have 3 SSD's in two laptops and one desktop machine and so far none failed, but I am prepared for any one of them to fail at any time. If it does, I'll readily buy a new one a replace it - because I feel their cost is justified by their speed. All
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Where those enterprise class ssds or consumer grade...?
The drives were Verbatim 128GB model 2SSD128, made in Taiwan (if that matters).
I would guess that is consumer grade, but I am not an expert on SSD, obviously.
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made in Taiwan (if that matters)
Well, made in Taiwan means pretty high quality these days.
Some say vinyl LPs sound better. (Score:2)
Almost exclusively SSD for daily use (Score:2)
Have three desktop machines at home (Win 7, Win 8, Debian Linux) and all three have a single SSD and nothing else. Two are Corsair Force drives and the newest is a Samsung 840 Pro. Lightning fast - I'd never go back to HDDs.
I think that SDDs being more failure prone is debatable these days. Some of the earlier ones were pretty unreliable, and I'd avoid OCZ like the plague, but other than that I don't think their failure rates are any worse than normal HDDs (which aren't exactly pillars of reliability to beg
How do you determine "use"? (Score:2)
I have a much larger percentage of my data on traditional HDDs, but my SSD has my most frequently accessed files, OS, and applications, so probably gets the highest proportion of reads/writes. So depending on the metric it could go either way.
OS boots faster than monitor (Score:2)
OS on SSD, media on HDD (Score:2)
Each type of storage has it's strong and weak points... the key is to use them appropriately.
HDD's still common because they're cheap. (Score:2)
I think most people are still using hard disks for large-scale primary storage for one reason: they're cheap. I can get a two terabyte Serial ATA Rev. 3.0 (600 MB/second data transfer rate) for just over US$100. Two terabytes of SSD storage would cost 12 to 20 times more expensive--yikes!
Do these count? (Score:2)
Washing machines and driers? They spin...
Where does flash media fit? (Score:2)
I've got 32 gigs each in my phone and tablet. And a variety of SD cards in various cameras. My gaming rig and two laptops have hybrid drives with 8 gigs of SSD each and various amounts of spinning storage. My media array has 14 2tb drives, none hybrids. My DVRs have 8tb of spinning drives. My old netbook has a 500 gig spinner. So I picked the first choice because, even if I include all of my flash media, solid state storage makes up a tiny percentage of my storage.
But, what little solid state storage
cool that we're even asking this question (Score:2)
SSD has matured when we're asking ourselves what we use spinning media for. the day has arrived :)
Yarr.. Arg... Me Hearties... (Score:2)
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> Nobody would use a SSD for storage.
Uh, why do you think people use ZFS ZIF on SSD?
SSD, like every media, has trade-off.
Reliability is not its strong suite -- but with enough cheap redundant disks it can be "good enough."
RAID0 SSD = wicked fast.
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Nothing is faster than a RAM drive.
Except L1 cache. I want 512GB of that!
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i have no idea what these words mean.
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I've had people tell me I was wrong/lying when I said RAM cost $100 per MB when Windows95 came out. That is why i waited to 1996 to buy a computer. In '95, the 32MB of EDO memory I wanted would have meant a base of $3200, before even considering motherboard, CPU, and the rest.
The next year, memory was at $1 per MB. Yes, a 99% drop by the summer of '96.
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The 4MB ram upgrade I put in my 386 in 1992 only cost $200 at the time... so ram prices were discontinuously high in 1995 if thats the case. My ~$1300 Compaq Presario 7180 came with 8MB ram in November 1995, and that included a 1.2GB hard drive and a P100 processor. I doubt the ram was the majority of the price of that system.
Do I think you're making it up? No. Do I think you might have been looking at some weirdly expensive memory? Probably.
Oh yeah, also, my 16MB upgrade cost about $150 the year after, in
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Depends on where you lived. In '92 4MB of ram was in the 250-400 range here in Canada, that was standard 30pin SIMM. And the price dropped through the floor the following year. Then again, I remember when a 40MB drive was just shy of $500 in the early 90's, and by the mid 90's I could get a 1.6GB HDD for $169.
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Re:Storage. (Score:5, Informative)
I install most everything that I want to load quickly on my SSD, including various games which remain static. Everything else gets to go on a hard drive, especially things that are likely to change and shift a lot. So all my caches are dynamically linked to hard drives. But that is just how I do it because it improves performance in the areas I want while reducing the odds that I'll wear it out early.
However if I did a lot of video editing or something else where I handled lots of large files constantly it would be a different story. See I don't care how long pictures and video take to load from my hard drive, but if that was all that you did all day it would be a lot faster to have them on a SSD. And by doing that you could gain a good bit of productivity. You might wear out the SSD a lot faster but if you are using it for business then hopefully you can just write off the new SSD's as a cost of business.
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I install most everything that I want to load quickly on my SSD, including various games which remain static. Everything else gets to go on a hard drive, especially things that are likely to change and shift a lot. So all my caches are dynamically linked to hard drives. But that is just how I do it because it improves performance in the areas I want while reducing the odds that I'll wear it out early.
There is really no need to be discreet about "wearing out" an SSD. A present-day SSD should be able to handle a bunch of frequently-changing caches (and those are exactly places where you really benefit of the speed). Remember that SSDs are designed to tolerate swapping too, which involves a lot of disk traffic.
Wearing the drive might become a concern in specialized scenarios where the machine writes to the drive full throttle 24/7. Other than that, you can do all the stuff that you would do with an HDD.
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Wearing the drive might become a concern in specialized scenarios where the machine writes to the drive full throttle 24/7. Other than that, you can do all the stuff that you would do with an HDD.
Probably not fashionable advice on /. but I second this.
I've plenty of customers running Intel 520s. Other than the basics (such as turning off background defrag), they get exactly the same usage as a hard drive would.
I've had my share of insta-gibbed SSDs so naturally everyone is backed up to-the-minute (BackBlaze, if you are interested) but I don't baby the things. I almost expect the drives to eventually shit themselves due to a firmware problem before they run out of writes. That said, I've had no faile
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Benchmarks I've seen show that compiles pretty don't matter you get CPU bound. Some even had a slight degrade with SSD (probably a fluke but still shows that SSD is in the noise zone for that use case). Really where it kills is app loading and booting and such.
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Nobody would use a SSD for storage.
Except Linus. But then again, I guess he technically put an OS there...
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I installed a SSD for the OS on my Windows 7 DVR. Boot up time was almost 5 minutes with the AV drive. Now it's under 10 seconds. By bootup time I mean from power on until I can start using applications since with the AV drive it took forever after logging in. It was mind blowing how much faster Windows starts up with a SSD in this case. I think part of the slowness was it indexing all of the media on the 3TB drive.
On my Linux systems the performance improvement is not nearly so much. I think part of the re
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> I installed a SSD for the OS on my Windows 7 DVR. Boot up time was almost 5 minutes with the AV drive.
My cold restart time with MythTV is under a minute with a conventional drive. Some problems are just self inflicted.
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No kidding. I saw the "7 minutes" and decided that just about defines "WTF? You got a Pentium Pro in that case, buddy?"
For my stock consumer-grade HP laptop running OpenSUSE 12.1, it's 27 seconds from 'off' to KDE login screen. No SSD, either.
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Er, *5* minutes, and I've obviouly not yet had my coffee. Still a big WTF, though.
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Yarderhay, somebody old enough to remember ether for winter starts. Tire chains, too, eh? Along with a couple of sand bags, a short-handled shovel and some burlap bags in the trunk.
From when it was in beta I've been using Soluto on my Windows installs. It makes for an easy way to keep track of start up times and lets one delay or turn off various auto-start items. Also makes it easy to distinguish between power-on, to login, to usable desktop. On my old Vista 64-bit I saved over a minute from power to
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performance increase from putting an OS on a SSD
This should only really matter if you're rebooting an awful lot (or equivalently hibernating to disk and not to memory (or hybrid disk/memory).
Modern OS's (even windows) are all very good at using "unused" memory to cache disk pages - and with 8GB or more common these days, that pretty much means any apps you use more than a couple times between reboots will be cached in RAM --- so they'll be exactly as fast if it was RAM-caching-SSD or RAM-caching-spinning-disks.
Personally, I find SSD most useful for m
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standby is not used when you're not planning on using it soon
I thought most OS's these days suspend to both RAM and Disk at the same time [archlinux.org]. That way, if you don't lose power resume is instant; and if you do, you can still fall-back to slowly resuming from disk.
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Nah, at that time you had motherboards who supported 128k RAM at the most, look up the 1983 PC-XT. This was the era before compatible PCs. Cheap HDD became available earlier than plentiful RAM. In 1986 standard compatible PCs had a 20-40MB HDD and 512kB RAM.
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Why put the OS on SSD? Doesn't your OS cache stuff?
Some people turn their computers off -- so I'm told. I surmise. I have it on very good authority.
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Bah, that was barely an improvement over our core memory [wikipedia.org], which was much cooler. Just be sure you don't stack them in a box like one damn fool did.
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Mercury delay lines [wikipedia.org] FTW!
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Badly worded poll is bad
Apropos bad wording:
* spinning HDD plate or CD/DVD/whatever are still solid, we aren't technologically advanced enough to store data in a whirlpool, tornado or the accretion disk of black holes
* even if you don't see it, there's still something spinning inside an SSD (the electrons for instance).
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Badly worded poll is bad
Apropos bad wording:
* spinning HDD plate or CD/DVD/whatever are still solid, we aren't technologically advanced enough to store data in a whirlpool, tornado or the accretion disk of black holes
* even if you don't see it, there's still something spinning inside an SSD (the electrons for instance).
No, I think the quarks are spinning, but the electrons are revolving.
But I could be wrong. Every time I look at one, it appears to be stopped.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I may have to go feed my cat.
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No, I think the quarks are spinning, but the electrons are orbiting
FTFY. BTW, the cat is dead.
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When an HDD fails, you can still get the data off of it. It's expensive, but it can be done.
Normally it's so expensive that you can't afford it, so lets assume it can't be done (afterall, if the data was that important you could have raided it for 1/10th the cost)
When an SSD fails, it seems that more often than not your data just disappears. I think this is why the industry is moving towards only using SSDs for caching to platter drives, because honestly I don't believe SSDs will ever be reliable enough for critical storage.
Outright failures of HDD's still happen more than SSD's.
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When an HDD fails, you can still get the data off of it. It's expensive, but it can be done.
At current prices, you can buy several TB of flash for the cost of recovery on a single HDD (which may or may not succeed, depending on the failure mode). If your data is important enough to you to even consider that, then you should probably be backing it up regularly...
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When an HDD fails, you can still get the data off of it. It's expensive, but it can be done. When an SSD fails, it seems that more often than not your data just disappears.
In either case, it doesn't really matter because you can just replace the drive and then restore the data from your backup drive.
You are making regular backups, right? :^)
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Given the wide variety of solid state in lots of things (are you going to count the firmware in my car as well?), One would have expected some leeway.
How come people foe me all the time but nobody friends me? also, that happens on slashdot too :(
You foe'd me first, perhaps it's because you are a foe-happy prick?
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if I foe'd you, how could I read your post?
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Or if they have RAM in their computer.
I still use Williams tubes, you insensitive clod!
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If I sum the memory every USB stick, Smartphone, MP3 player, I got around 256GB. Now If I compare that to my 16TB of spinning storage, I can say that I don't use solid state storage.
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No, you primarily use platters. Difference between none and some
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Saw somewhere recently, probably on /. recent reliability numbers that were far in favor of SSD something like 1.5% vs 5% failure/yr. For servers assuming you have a maintenance agreement I wouldn't care, if the disk drive fails a new one shows up in a few hours and rebuilds off of the rest of the array. The performance you could get for db applications for example so make it worth it. Much less worry about multiple different tables getting hit etc. Still a performance impact but transactions aren't waiting