[Dovecot] SSD drives are really fast running Dovecot

[Stan Hoeppner]

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