OK, folks, SSD. You know you want one. What is it? Solid-state drives. Drives that are made up of flash memory. As I tell people still trying to figure this out — it’s a souped-up memory stick as your hard drive. Why bother? No moving parts = longer working life (up to 10 years), lowered power consumption. SSD also means faster access times (100 TIMES faster) and less susceptibilty to physical shock. What’s the downside? Well, it used to be cost but we’re seeing 32 GB going for $600. Yes, I know that seems quite expensive but I think this is a HUGE deal for those who need more ruggedized systems and those who need much dependable systems. One of those conditions pretty much means every nonprofit IT director out there.
Those of you equipping people in the field with laptops will be glad to know that SSD drives are supposed to lengthen battery life. However, I feel that these SSDs will be useful for this particular mission: lengthening the life of important application servers that can’t have downtime and whose hard drives are past three years old and which you can’t afford to mirror the server hardware. There’s a particular class of machines in my data center that need this. Single application servers that were purchased as part of a turnkey system with little or no hardware redundancy. Yes, I have multiple single points of failure and yes, it keeps me up at night.
The problem is this: do I have the time to keep imaging my most important app servers over and over again? Probably not, and the cost of something like Symantec’s Live State Recovery is prohibitive. Why not swap the hard drive with a relatively inexpensive piece of hardware like an SSD and then back it up with an Ghost image on a spare hard drive every once in a while? Let’s do the analysis:
A hard drive’s real-life lifespan is around 3-4 years on average. If you have drives this old, you’re definitely skating on thin ice. You have options at this point. You can image the drive now to another new hard drive and let that sit around for the day your drive finally dies. However, you’ll have downtime and your backed-up data will be old. This may or may not be an issue.
Installing an SSD now will keep you going for up to a decade. That’s so long that your turnkey application may be made redundant by then. Also, you know that the hardware is simply more reliable than a hard drive just by virtue of the way it’s made. Sure, go ahead and keep that spare drive around just in case and do your normal backups (if possible, I’ve noticed my turnkey servers tend not to play well with others). The only thing we have to fear are the remaining moving parts (the CPU fan or power supply fan). However, those things are trivial compared to a drive going down. I’ll take the loss of a mobo over a hard drive any time.
Sandisk, Samsung, and Ritek have made some press releases regarding their SSDs and we should start seeing them this year. As soon as they drop to less than $500 for a 32 GB device, I’m in for one at least.
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