# Are SSD's good for server applications?



## AshleyAshes (Jun 8, 2012)

So, I have this rather decent AMD A6-3500 based home theater PC and server.  It runs XBMC in my bedroom, it also runs network shares for other HTPCs and machines can access it's storage, it runs Drive Bender which merges it's large storage drives into one large virtual drive, and it runs sabnzbd, SickBeard, and CouchPotato so that I can get my TV and movies off of UseNet and not spend $70 a month on cable TV just so I can watch Iron Chef.  The machine contains two 2TB drives and one 3TB drive, the drives are primarily media storage and 'warm' storage for film projects.

My concern is that one of these 2TB drives contains an 80GB partition which houses Windows 7, all software and acts as the temporary download location for sabnzbd before completed downloads are moved to the storage drives.  This means that two of the drives are usually spun down, and only spin up if having media written to them or being read off them.  Meanwhile, the 2TB drive with the system partition is spun up a lot more often, even if just to let XBMC access it's bajillion series/film wallpapers to use in it's screen saver.  I'd like to move to a dedicated drive for the OS, so that the storage drives can ALL sleep when not in use and have their lives prolonged.

My options are an HDD or an SSD.  An HDD is mechanical in nature so it could fail prematurely and all that accessing could cause excessive wear, but it'd also be cheap.  How would an SSD perform in this duty?  I realize that SSDs normally don't like to be super frequently written to and deleted, but only the area holding temporary downloads would experience this, the rest of the system data would be pretty static except for the slowly growing database of series/film information and graphics.  While we're at it, how would an enterprise level HDD work in this task?  Are enterprise HDD's loud?  This is an HTPC that sits in my bedroom, so I'd like to not find out that a 10 000 RPM enterprise drive basically 'quietly screams' as it spins or something.


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## CaptainCool (Jun 8, 2012)

i dont know anything about enterprise level HDDs but i did own an SSD.
and i think a proper SSD would be the better choice in this case.
while its true that they dont really like to be super frequently written to and deleted but with the newer SSDs that shouldnt be an issue. it would still last longer than the mechanical HDD. mainly because its a gradual process when an SSD fails. the blocks die individually, unlike an HDD which can just die completely from one moment to the next because of a mechanical problem.

i dont have any experience with them when it comes to servers though. i only had it in my desktop PC with the system on it.


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## shteev (Jun 8, 2012)

Servers generally require a large amount of storage space and, when needed, just dump the files they need to host into the large amount of RAM they have to make up for the lack of speed that the drive has.

However, in your case, it would make sense to have your OS drive be an SSD. Not only would it boot up faster and get going really quickly, but, as you stated, the other drives would be set to go to sleep and, therefore, would last longer.

TL;DR

Sure, get an SSD.


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## Fernin (Jun 8, 2012)

SSDs are good for nothing but short life spans, total data loss when they die, and stupid high prices for tiny capacities.

Stick with a platter.


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## CaptainCool (Jun 9, 2012)

Fernin said:


> SSDs are good for nothing but short life spans, total data loss when they die, and stupid high prices for tiny capacities.
> 
> Stick with a platter.



you are generalizing SSDs pretty harschly here.
the life span has improved a lot and even the older ones will last more than long enough for an average user.
and usually you have your system on them only, so even when they do fail completely data loss isnt an issue because you shouldnt have important files on your system partition.

about the price... yeah they are expensive. but they do offer many advantages compared to HDDs and they are rather new compared to HDDs as well.

as far as PCs go SSDs are still kind of a luxury item. you dont really need them and might as well go with an HDD and get more storage but if you WANT one they are an available option.


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## AshleyAshes (Jun 9, 2012)

Fernin said:


> SSDs are good for nothing but short life spans, total data loss when they die, and stupid high prices for tiny capacities.
> 
> Stick with a platter.



Life span isn't much of a concern for me, since the SSD in case would largely just be adding to a library and reading from it.  Other than that, just temporary download location.  'Total data loss' when a drive dies doesn't matter, because I expect total data loss when a drive dies.  I realize data recovery is much more possible with a platter drive, but it costs a lot and I'd need some VERY important data to save which this server's system drive would not feature.  I'd just make a complete system backup instead.  High prices, sure, but at least I don't have to worry about a metal disc spinning at 7200rpm eventually mmechanically failing.  And it WILL fail, every moving part EVENTUALLY fails.

That said, I located a 'New Old' 320GB 7200RPM 3.5" drive for $35 and that seems like the more economical choice.  Especially as it'll give me more room to expand on this system drive, which may come to house games and other media for the HTPC to run.

Though I still think I'll get an SSD for my laptop come August when school goes back in.


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## Aden (Jun 9, 2012)

Fernin said:


> SSDs are good for nothing but short life spans, total data loss when they die, and stupid high prices for tiny capacities.
> 
> Stick with a platter.



They've come a long way. The write limit on the SSD in my laptop is high enough that I can write 40GB a day to it for five years before it dies. And it cost me under a dollar per gigâ€”a huge improvement from only a year ago.

As to your second point, consider backups. 

Ashley, I think an SSD would serve your needs nicely here if you're willing to spend the extra cash. If not, definitely get one for your laptop. It's almost disgusting how much of a speed difference it made on mine


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## Fernin (Jun 9, 2012)

Once SSDs become truly reliable and have an average lifespan of longer than 3 years, with a capacity of 2TB or better for less than $130 and don't require 2-4 of them for data loss security, or better yet can't have an entire array fragged by a small power surge THEN I'll consider them fondly. Until that day comes they're worthless to me.


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## AshleyAshes (Jun 9, 2012)

Aden said:


> Ashley, I think an SSD would serve your needs nicely here if you're willing to spend the extra cash. If not, definitely get one for your laptop. It's almost disgusting how much of a speed difference it made on mine



Like I said, I opted for a New-Used 320GB HDD I found on a Kijiji (Sorta like Craigslist, but with no personal ads and mostly Canadian) for $35.  Why someone just had a new, sealed, 320GB 7200RPM drive sitting around, I have no idea but with prices the way they are, a 320GB suited my needs well.  Even with a 120GB I had concerns that future downloads might exceed the drive (Entire season downloads in some next gen format for example) and I wanted to put some PC games on the server since it's also an HTPC as well.  Though the laptop will get an SSD, it'll keep the HDD as well, which I'll move into the optical drive bay using a caddy.  I look forward to that SSD upgrade, but I'll wait till August when I'll also put 16GB of RAM into said laptop.



Fernin said:


> Once SSDs become truly reliable and have an average lifespan of longer than 3 years, with a capacity of 2TB or better for less than $130 and don't require 2-4 of them for data loss security, or better yet can't have an entire array fragged by a small power surge THEN I'll consider them fondly. Until that day comes they're worthless to me.



Dude... I don't think HDDs fit your bizarrely angry fanboy requirements...

I really don't get your deal on 'data security' especially.  While certianly any controller failure, in an HDD, even from a power surge, would leave data recovery services cost a fair bit of money and few people would make use of such services unless the lost data was REALLY important.  So I don't considder that to be a 'feature' of HDDs at all.  Frankly, I can't afford to use data recovery services so I opt for the cheaper solution of 'Have backups of my stuff'.  If I were to ever make use of data recovery services, that data would have to be PRETTY important to me.

I could maybe see one of my film projects being that important 'I lost all my footage, here's all my money, fix it, fix it fix it! D:' but as a general rule I don't delete footage even off the camera till I have backups.

Also... You need to calm down.  How about some tea?


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## greg-the-fox (Jun 9, 2012)

Is SSD stability really a serious problem? Wow I would've expected them to be more reliable than hard drives because of no moving parts... I guess I was wrong

Reading the reviews on This product, you would think it was amazing and flawless. I mean 83% 5 star reviews? That's almost unheard of! But you look at the lower star reviews and a LOT of people are saying that this drive only has a lifespan of 8-9 months and loads of firmware issues. Could it be possible that all of the high reviews are people who just installed it and were so impressed by the speed that they neglected to wait to write the reviews to see if any problems emerged? How many of their drives failed 8 months down the road? With Hard drives it's easy to trust reviews, drives are either working or DOA. It's true that ALL devices have a failure rate, it's impossible to avoid. You just have to go for the one with the lowest chance of failing. But these SSDs seem like ticking time bombs to me, you can't just look at the 1 star reviews and say "yep, that's the failure rate, it's bound to happen, I'll accept the risk" But with this I have NO idea what the actual failure rate is, it could be way, way higher than it appears... it's making me paranoid and I don't think I want to buy one anymore...


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## AshleyAshes (Jun 9, 2012)

greg-the-fox said:


> Is SSD stability really a serious problem? Wow I would've expected them to be more reliable than hard drives because of no moving parts... I guess I was wrong
> 
> Reading the reviews on This product, you would think it was amazing and flawless. I mean 83% 5 star reviews? That's almost unheard of! But you look at the lower star reviews and a LOT of people are saying that this drive only has a lifespan of 8-9 months and loads of firmware issues. Could it be possible that all of the high reviews are people who just installed it and were so impressed by the speed that they neglected to wait to write the reviews to see if any problems emerged? How many of their drives failed 8 months down the road? With Hard drives it's easy to trust reviews, drives are either working or DOA. But these SSDs seem like ticking time bombs to me, you can't just look at the 1 star reviews and say "yep, that's the failure rate, it's bound to happen, I'll accept the risk" because ALL products have a failure rate. But with this I have NO idea what the actual failure rate is, it could be way, way higher than it appears... it's making me paranoid and I don't think I want to buy one anymore...


'

He's grossly exagerating things.  SSD's do have issues with 'wear', you can only write to a piece of NAND flash so many times, and each time it's just a biiiiit slower.  So each section of the HDD getting written to wears it down just a bit more.  This was more an issue with older drives and older operating systems and the things can readily last for years now.

Since it's NAND flash, it's a lot easier to erase data.  There's even a command that'll instantly flip every bit on the drive to zero, where as this could take HOURS on an HDD.  It's actually sorta HARD to delete data on an HDD, cause by default file systems don't waste time trying to write zeros, they just mark the file to be ignored and where that file was will be written over by something new eventually.  This is why just hitting Shift+Del doesn't truely delete anything.  It's also why my partition table messed up on my server and I have GetDataBack pulling 1.2TB of data.  The files are still in there, they're just not mapped to anything.  Similarly, a power surge could burn out an SDD and it would burn out EVERYTHING, you'd have a hockey puck.  Where as on an HDD, you'd just burn out the controller but everything would still be magnetically encoded to the disc.  You could go to a professional who could recover your data for you... In exchange for a generious fee.  But when have you EVER heard of someone having a HDD die on them and them actually paying money for data recovery?  It costs a fair bit, it costs more than the hard drive, so when people pay for data recovery it has to be IMPORTANT data.

Most of his concerns are pretty irrelevent to the typical user really.

However it IS true that some SSDs have had firmware bugs that have accidently errased all kinds of crap on the drives, erased them entirely.  Well... Accident's happen with new technology.


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## Runefox (Jun 9, 2012)

SSD's are actually quite good for servers serving high volumes of smaller files. The faster reaction time and higher overall throughput make it excellent for, say, a webserver serving websites with many simultaneous requests (One person accessing FA's main page is somewhere around 79 separate requests). That makes a huge difference on a platter when hundreds of people are accessing it at once, and especially when data is changing and can't be cached (again, FA, forums, or other similar examples). Some data is cached in memory, but for everything else, there's SSD or RAID5 (or RAID10 or RAID0+1). For a *fileserver*, though, SSD's aren't optimal due to their limited capacity. They're best used as an OS drive or for the rapid, random access example of a high-volume webserver.

Reliability in SSD's is only really a problem with the Sandforce bullshit. Proper Intel SSD's generally have A) a fair bit of auxilliary space in case of cell failure, B) A cache system that finishes writes in progress prior to shutdown, C) A half-decent chipset (520's use Sandforce though, but with Intel firmware), and D) Don't use stream compression to achieve their speed, so speed is consistent.

In general, SSD's will tend to be more reliable than platters because while they do have a limited write cycle, wear-leveling and higher quality cells reduce the effect to the point where the average life cycle of a well-maintained SSD is around 3-5 years, similar to a hard drive. As with all storage media, it's not a matter of if, but when the drive will fail, and both SSD's and traditional HDD's have issues with firmware and wear over time (HDD firmware example: Seagate 7200.11 1TB+ drives). Typically, with both an SSD and a HDD, if the controller fails (typically the one instance for an SSD that will prevent you from at least reading what's on it), the NAND and platters will still have the information stored on them, and can be accessed by swapping the circuit board (though for SSD's, this usually requires a soldering iron, you usually won't be doing this on an HDD either unless you do that for a living).



> Once SSDs become truly reliable and have an average lifespan of longer than 3 years, with a capacity of 2TB or better for less than $130 and don't require 2-4 of them for data loss security, or better yet can't have an entire array fragged by a small power surge THEN I'll consider them fondly. Until that day comes they're worthless to me.



I'm sorry, what decade is this? When did you last use an SSD? With a USB flash drive? Seriously, capacity and $ per GB are the only issues hampering SSD's today. How many iPhones and iPads have you seen with completely dead, unreadable, never-again-to-be-used flash memory? MacBook Airs? Android phones? The flash memory you get in your dollar store USB flash drives is *not* the same as in an SSD. Just steer clear of the Sandforce bullshit. Not to mention :lawl: $130 2TB drives. Guess you didn't get the memo about the flooding in Thailand and that the HDD manufacturers are content to let the price sit high for a while seeing as they can get away with it.


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## kayfox (Jun 13, 2012)

Some things:
I have heard that its pretty difficult to securely delete data on most flash devices.  Most ATA flash devices will wait until idle or a sector is needed before erasing it, otherwise its merely marked as erased in the controller's tables.

Also, be careful about how you think about "writing blah GB to disk" if your on a machine that hits swap a lot, it could chew through several GB per second in a bad moment.

SSDs are pretty good for write infrequently and read often applications with smaller datasets.

Edit to add:
Also, wiping a whole hard disk clean is pretty easy.  Its one set of commands and then the drive wont allow data reads or writes until its erased, see ATA Secure Erase.


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## Runefox (Jun 13, 2012)

Actually, most _filesystems_ will wait until a sector is needed before erasing it, regardless of storage media. FAT32, for instance, merely tags the _file_ entry as deleted. SSD's are actually _more likely_ to permanently erase deleted data due to the internal garbage collection they're constantly doing thanks to TRIM. As for ATA Secure Erase, it's much more prudent to use a utility to scramble the data than to simply zero it, since it's still possible (not necessarily trivial) to recover a zeroed drive. If security is that great a factor, multiple passes should be done.


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## greg-the-fox (Jun 14, 2012)

Okay I changed my mind, I really want one. I saw a video of one in action. So fast omfg. (if only the monies...)
And the Samsung 830 series seem to be the most reliable models right now, so that should get rid of any doubts about quality. No Sandforce here, thankfully.


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## kayfox (Jun 16, 2012)

Runefox said:


> Actually, most _filesystems_ will wait until a sector is needed before erasing it, regardless of storage media. FAT32, for instance, merely tags the _file_ entry as deleted. SSD's are actually _more likely_ to permanently erase deleted data due to the internal garbage collection they're constantly doing thanks to TRIM.



Most filesystems don't erase anything, you can only read as much as you have written, sparse file handling is why if you go and create a file thats 50MB of zero, it always reads as zero (and often is a trivially small size on disk).

The basic issue with flash lifetimes is once its written, bits cant be changed without erasing the whole block and writing it again.  When wear leveling comes in this means that writes get distributed around the drive as they are committed.  This means that flash is used up faster than most people think, and consequently it may fail earlier than expected.



Runefox said:


> As for ATA Secure Erase, it's much more prudent to use a utility to scramble the data than to simply zero it, since it's still possible (not necessarily trivial) to recover a zeroed drive. If security is that great a factor, multiple passes should be done.



I don't think anyone here should be worried about zeroed data on disks being read.  It requires specialized hardware that only governments have to read that kind of data, and the reliability of those reads is low.


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## AshleyAshes (Jun 16, 2012)

kayfox said:


> I don't think anyone here should be worried about zeroed data on disks being read.  It requires specialized hardware that only governments have to read that kind of data, and the reliability of those reads is low.



This is infact an exageration.  Infact NO ONE has ever evercovered data from a hard disk sector once it has been overwritten once or zeroed.  This goes for both law enforcement and in research.  If any government posesses the technology to do this, it is a secret that no one knows about (So you can't say that they have this technology, because you don't know about it) and currently no researcher publishing publicly even has a practical theory as to how it'd be accomplished.


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## kayfox (Jun 17, 2012)

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html



> Deviations in the position of the drive head from the original track may leave significant portions of the previous data along the track edge relatively untouched.



This isn't the article I read on the technology, which was significantly more advanced (as it would be 10 years after this article) but I cant find that article to cite and I don't have ACM or IEEE subscriptions anymore.  But basically there are several techniques that depend on examining the magnetic patterns adjacent to the most recent track on the disk, since the head almost never completely covers the previous written track, on a much larger scale this is also used to determine what was previously encoded on erased magnetic cards (think hotel door keys).  The technology to do this kind of thing exists, but generally remains in the realm of small scale academic experiments, although some of these concepts were used to read the drive from Space Shuttle Columbia.  What the various three letter agencies have, is unknown and likely to remain unknown for a while.


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## AshleyAshes (Jun 17, 2012)

kayfox said:


> But basically there are several techniques that depend on examining the magnetic patterns adjacent to the most recent track on the disk, since the head almost never completely covers the previous written track, on a much larger scale this is also used to determine what was previously encoded on erased magnetic cards (think hotel door keys).



It's still never been done.  This is a theoretical paper from when hard drive data density was insignifigant compared to what it is now.  We're putting 1TB on a single platter today and that's growing.  If you do believe that this is doable, then you should have no difficulty finding an example of it being done.  A modern hard drive, sectors zeroed or otherwise written over, and meaningful information required.

It's also interesting that your article is written by Gutmann, since Gutmann et al also put together techniques for perminantly erasing data around the same time.  However Gutmann's theory so far has only been that, a theory, it's never been confirmed.  The article in no way says that it's been done or that current technology exists can do it, it simply postulates a theory.  Simply put, if it can be done, someone's done it and published about it.  You should have no difficulty finding examples if they exist.

So let's stop playing around in the theoretical and playing in the practical; If you zero your hard drive, the cops will never find your kiddy porn, no matter what forensic techniques they employ.


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## Jaxinc (Jun 18, 2012)

AshleyAshes said:


> So, I have this rather decent AMD A6-3500 based home theater PC and server.  It runs XBMC in my bedroom, it also runs network shares for other HTPCs and machines can access it's storage, it runs Drive Bender which merges it's large storage drives into one large virtual drive, and it runs sabnzbd, SickBeard, and CouchPotato so that I can get my TV and movies off of UseNet and not spend $70 a month on cable TV just so I can watch Iron Chef.  The machine contains two 2TB drives and one 3TB drive, the drives are primarily media storage and 'warm' storage for film projects.
> 
> My concern is that one of these 2TB drives contains an 80GB partition which houses Windows 7, all software and acts as the temporary download location for sabnzbd before completed downloads are moved to the storage drives.  This means that two of the drives are usually spun down, and only spin up if having media written to them or being read off them.  Meanwhile, the 2TB drive with the system partition is spun up a lot more often, even if just to let XBMC access it's bajillion series/film wallpapers to use in it's screen saver.  I'd like to move to a dedicated drive for the OS, so that the storage drives can ALL sleep when not in use and have their lives prolonged.
> 
> My options are an HDD or an SSD.  An HDD is mechanical in nature so it could fail prematurely and all that accessing could cause excessive wear, but it'd also be cheap.  How would an SSD perform in this duty?  I realize that SSDs normally don't like to be super frequently written to and deleted, but only the area holding temporary downloads would experience this, the rest of the system data would be pretty static except for the slowly growing database of series/film information and graphics.  While we're at it, how would an enterprise level HDD work in this task?  Are enterprise HDD's loud?  This is an HTPC that sits in my bedroom, so I'd like to not find out that a 10 000 RPM enterprise drive basically 'quietly screams' as it spins or something.



From the way you describe it for your server SSD drives could work for what you need. I would use a HDD for the OS and primary access, and SSD for the static drives rarely accessed.

Enterprise drives are no louder than a standard HDD. We have 5 15,000rpm WD drives in our server here, but it's always on 24/7 and the only abnormal noise is the read heads can sometimes chatter more than a laptop drive's on high data use(ALTHOUGH this is hard to hear over the twin 1000watt PSU fans, not sure what you have going). Note that Enterprise drives are pricier than normal drives but are designed to run 24/7 for up to 4 years reliably. After 4 years of 24/7 use we have experienced catastrophic HDD failure, so we try to not push them past that, but if your server isn't running in an always on state... you could get 10+ years out of the drives easily.


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## kayfox (Jun 18, 2012)

AshleyAshes said:


> It's still never been done.  This is a theoretical paper [...]



Well, I did say *"The technology to do this kind of thing exists, but generally remains in the realm of small scale academic experiments, although some of these concepts were used to read the drive from Space Shuttle Columbia."*



AshleyAshes said:


> So let's stop playing around in the theoretical and playing in the practical; If you zero your hard drive, the cops will never find your kiddy porn, no matter what forensic techniques they employ.



I think this is the point I was getting at by saying *"I don't think anyone here should be worried about zeroed data on disks being read. It requires specialized hardware that only governments have to read that kind of data, and the reliability of those reads is low."*


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