[kwlug-disc] new hardward for linux - recommendations?

[Darcy Casselman]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Paul Nijjar <paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> I know that this topic has come up before, but I wasn't paying
> attention and apparently I'm too lazy to search the archives. What
> should I be looking for in SSDs? What brands can I trust? Do I have to worry
> about wear-levelling and that nonsense still?

The canonical answer is "Buy Intel."  But they're surprisingly hard to
find.  And apparently, Crucial's new drive has overtaken Intel's fast
drive in benchmarks anyway.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-state-hard-drives.html

As you can see, there's a big difference between drives.  Which makes
picking them up kind of tough.

When I bought my SSD for my laptop, I tried to find an Intel drive
online but couldn't.  So after being jerked around by NCIX for a bit,
I just went into Canada Computers and asked them for a fast SSD around
64GB (it was about a year ago).  I just trusted them, but a safer
approach is probably to get their recommendation and then research
benchmarks on that drive.

> To what extent does it make sense to use SSDs in a RAID configuration?

RAID 1 or 5, sure.  Although the drives are already pretty expensive.
You're probably better off with just making sure you're backing things
up, like any other drive.

I'd never do RAID 0.  Sure it's probably really fast, but you're
doubling the risk of drive failure.  And when an SSD goes, it goes.
(Mine hasn't gone yet.  Knock wood.  I keep data on spinning disks
anyway, because they're big, cheap and it doesn't need to be fast for
that).

Darcy.