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So some might say Im an experienced infrastructure architect guy and have been putting together server farms, storage subsystems and networks for a number of years in datacenter environments (specialising in virtualisation).

I have been putting together large SAS and SATA arrays, SAN, DAS, NAS, Local for ages but I have not yet used SSD's for any of my storage in the datacenter environment. I have just one question that is making me lose sleep...

If using SSD's for performance, how does one provide redundancy like in a standard RAID 1/10/5/50 set up when SSD's main failure cause is their write endurance?

I would assume using SSD's in a RAID 10 for example will give me great performance, however all drives in the array would fail at the same time due to experiencing the same write load at roughly the same time? Thus meaning I have the same ticking countdown to failure, not on just 1 SSD, but all in the array.

Am I missing something or is there another best practice method for providing redundancy to SSD's? Or is this a non issue since the endurance limit of an SSD is just that, the end of its life and I cannot protect against that anyway?

Thanks

Tom

tomstephens89
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  • (ssds do not have an exact count of bytes after which they will be guaranteed to fail) You can use different brand ssds for raid1 members, use enterprise not consumer models, keep and eye on their health via smart, have a backup system – Dan Aug 09 '15 at 19:03

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Take a look at: Consumer (or prosumer) SSD's vs. fast HDD in a server environment

In short, treat these like normal disks. RAID them. Don't be concerned about why the SSD fails, but just that they may fail. Follow the RAID controller's recommendations.

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ewwhite
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  • Thanks, it would seem that the general consensus is to treat them just like any other traditional drives. Failure is always going to happen eventually, but we can use RAID to protect against abnormal premature failure. I do think that this means SMART information is going to be even more important now. – tomstephens89 Aug 09 '15 at 21:48