We're considering building an Oracle database with 12 Intel X25-M G2 160GB drives in software RAID10. It'd be running Linux. Database gets some very heavy write activity during the early morning data load, other than that it is mostly read-only (and the read load is fairly minimal).
We're currently running on 11 150GB Velociraptors (also Linux software RAID10), and are hoping the X25-M will speed up the data load.
We currently have redo on different disks than the rest of the data.
I'm wondering a few things:
- Any experience with using X25-M drives for databases? The X25-E are unfortunately beyond our budget.
- Would it hurt to separate redo off to some magnetic (non-SSD) drives, say 2 (raid1) or 4 (raid10) Seagate Constellations?
According to Intel (but this site broke it down easier to read, and was faster to google) writing 100GB of data to the 80GB model of the X25-M drive, it will have a life of 5 years. How many write cycles also depends on how much of the drive is full (for wear leveling and write space)
I don't have any solid evidence, but I think the write wear in RAID would happen at about the same rate for a mirrored pair. So when one fails the other might fail at about the same time. Therefor I personally have concerns with consumer level SSD in production servers unless you can tolerate some down time and maybe some data loss.
No experience, but worth checking out the flash cache posts here. There is more stuff on SSD on his blog, such as here