SSDs and RAID

[biokinetica]

Would putting SSDs in a RAID configuration help lessen the wear & tear on each participatory drive and give each one longer life?

I've been thinking about making this a long-term project, but I've never set up a RAID system before. I'd also like to know if I'd be able to reap the benefits of striping and gain even faster read speeds than what SSDs already allow.

On a side note, what should I be looking for in a good RAID controller?

[nunman62]

I'm no expert when it comes to SSD drives, but I would think that if you had at least 4 SSD's (if anybody could afford that many at the moment!), probably the best raid config would be RAID 10 or better known as RAID 1+0. That way you have the best of both worlds with speed and data security. If one drive fails, the others will still have your data. Don't think because it is a SSD that it will not fail someday. It should last longer than a regular HD, but it is an electronic device and accessible to failure. Maybe some more people who know about SSD's can give you some more info on it.

This is probably one area where it may be best to wait when SSD's mature more and they become faster, bigger, and much more affordable.

[biokinetica]

SSDs are supposed to have far shorter lifespans than hard disks. That's the big drawback to using them in the first place, and why notebook manufacturers weren't jumping on SSDs as a replacement for the 2.5" hard disks. I was planning on RAID 5+hotspare since it's faster, has failure protection in the form of parity, and allows more usable drive-space.

If I were using hard disks, RAID 1+0 would be better because those drives are much cheaper.

[nunman62]

Ah yes! You are right about that. Due to repeated write cycles, it starts to wear out the SSD. They try to do wear leveling to alleviate the problem, but as small capacity as SSD drives are at this time, it probably doesn't much good (unless you limit your writes to the disk). This must be the reason most people just use SSD's for the OS and use HD's to store the data (since more writes are done for data than anything else).

[davmoo]

I don't know how applicable this is to what you're trying to build, but I read this article a few days ago, and you may find it interesting too:

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/article.php/3869031

[biokinetica]

I think that article is geared toward enterprise-level setups. I'm going down a much simpler route.