Matt put forth on 1/12/2011 1:15 PM:
I thought about doing this on my email server since its troubles are mostly disk I/O saturation but I was concerned about reliability. Have heard that after so many read/writes SSD will go bad. There are an awful lot of read/writes on an email server.
From: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
"As a sanity check - I found some data from Mtron (one of the few SSD oems who do quote endurance in a way that non specialists can understand). In the data sheet for their 32G product - which incidentally has 5 million cycles write endurance - they quote the write endurance for the disk as "greater than 85 years assuming 100G / day erase/write cycles" - which involves overwriting the disk 3 times a day."
That was written in 2007. SSD flash cell life has increased substantially in the 3-4 year period since.
From a flash cell longevity standpoint, any decent SSD with wear leveling is going to easily outlive the typical server replacement cycle of 3-5 years, and far beyond that. Note that striping two such SSDs (RAID 0) will double the wear cycle life, and striping 4 SSDs will quadruple it, so that 85 years becomes 340+ years of wear life with a 4 SSD stripe (RAID 0).
Your misgivings about using SSDs are based on obsolete data from many years ago.
-- Stan