

SSDs on AWS - Impact on Conversocial - colinhowe
http://www.colinhowe.co.uk/2012/jul/23/ssds-on-aws--impact-on-conversocial/

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pilif
Tangentially related: I'm a bit concerned about using SSDs for server-side
storage: Even if you RAID them, you still bought them at around the same time
and wear leveling will work on all the drives in about the same way (when you
consider RAID1). That means that the drives should die all together within a
very short time span.

Hard Drives of course fail too, but they don't have a physical limit of how
many times they can be written to, so at least in theory they shouldn't fail
at the same time (especially when you buy them from different manufacturing
batches).

Maybe I'm over-cautious, but IMHO the only safe way to use SSDs on a server is
to replace half of them every safe period (which is unknown - 6 months?). This
is very annoying maintenance you don't have to do with real harddrives where
you can just swap in the hot-spare and then replace the broken one at some
point close up.

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mootothemax
Interesting stuff, thanks for writing this up :)

Personally, I've moved entirely away from VPSs to dedicated servers instead,
mostly because I don't have the need to rapidly fire up lots of servers on
demand. I think this may be the year where I start investing in SSDs for
dedicated hardware, it seems the cost vs. performance gain is now heavily in
their favour.

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colinhowe
they're totally worth it:

    
    
      - less time spent optimising
      - fewer machines needed (can pile a lot more data on to one server)
    

If money really is an issue then something like flashcache might be a good
stepping stone (<https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/>)

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mootothemax
Great stuff, thanks. Right now, money isn't the issue exactly; it's the time
it would take to migrate, especially when I don't have a huge pressing need.
Next server though, I'll be there! :)

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jdevonport
Very interesting, I found a thread on Quora with more info and pricing if
anyone is interested... [http://www.quora.com/Amazon-Web-Services/When-did-
Amazon-Web...](http://www.quora.com/Amazon-Web-Services/When-did-Amazon-Web-
Services-begin-offering-SSDs-in-its-public-cloud)

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toddh
Is mirroring on the same machine really more reliable?

