[CentOS] Are SSD disks worth the cost for server usage?

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

> Hi,
>
> we want to upgrade our infrastructure and are considering renting two
> different types of server by a provider:
>
> - A: one is with 80 GB SSD (and 12 GB memory)
> http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/eg_ssd.xml
> - B: the other with 750 GB SATA2 (and 8 GB memory).
> http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/eg_best_of.xml
<snip>
> My question is whether it is worth using one of type A (with SSD
> drives) in order to host the critical data such as the web sites and
> the subversion repository (critical in the sense that these services
> should be fast, always available, and the related data as safe as
> possible).

The real question is how many hits/hour you expect. I interviewed last
year at a major advertiser... but (and I'm trying to remember from last
May) they were getting hundreds of millions of hits per day.

For tens or hundreds of thousands, the normal drives are more than fine.
That, of course, also depends on the sites: in early '03, I looked at a
small site, and the guy's web pages took *forever* to load... but that was
because he'd taken photos of his work, and each page had something like
four or six photos, each of which was 1.5M-4M.
<snip>
> My understanding is that SSD are much much faster.
> Is it really true in the real world?
>
> Are SSD drives also safer?
> (that is, less likely to crash under load)
> Or to the contrary?

The enterprise grade ones. And, if they're not enterprise grade, and the
provider's cheaping out and using the kind sold in stores, they're not as
reliable. If this is that important, I trust you're looking at SLA in the
contract.

        mark