[Dovecot] SSD drives are really fast running Dovecot

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2011, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> How do they fail? Supposedly once a cell has reached its erase-limit it 
> should become read-only. Maybe the failures had nothing to do with 
> wearing?

Hi Timo.  I start seeing I/O errors on read or write.  I must admit I 
don't have definitive proof that it is a wear level problem but there 
isn't any other obvious cause either.  ie, no known heat or other problems 
have occured on the systems.

It's left me a bit gun-shy of deploying SSD more widely.  I would 
certainly love to be able to trust it as an alternative to disk.

Yes cells certainly should go read-only when they run out of write-cycles, 
which would be a far less painful way for them to fail :)

One of the systems to fail was a firewall running off SSD.  A Linux based 
firewall can lose entire filesystems and keep running[1] so I first 
noticed the problem when the backups started to fail.

[1] Although you can't change the firewall ruleset without userspace 
tools.

Cheers,

Rpb

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