I’m debating on doing an ESXi 4.1/5.0 installation on a USB stick or a pair of 32GB SATA II SSDs (RAID1 mirror). According to VMWare’s documentation, when ESXi is booting it looks for a 4GB space for a scratch partition. Assuming the USB stick I use has adequate storage (say 16GB), is there any advantage to installing ESXi on an SSD or better yet, and SSD RAID1 mirror? Note: The documentation states that ESXi takes [...]

I have a Dell 2950 with a Perc 5/i controller inside it. I don’t want to spark a debate about drive types and which is “better” etc etc. Just simply; I would like to put in 2x Cheetah 15.5k SAS drives and mirror them for the OS. I would also like to put in 2x SSDs (exact model is still being debated) and mirror those for the data. Can the Perc 5/i manage multiple RAID [...]

I’m considering moving a large database from mechanical disks to SSDs. My initial instinct was to go for RAID 10, but further research suggests that this configuration can significantly reduce the random access performance of the SSDs. The database is very much read heavy and it’s generally generating large data reports, so my assumption is that there is very little by way of sequential workload. The main alternative suggested to RAID 10 when it comes [...]

S.M.A.R.T. (for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a wonderful technology to detect hard drive failure before it really happens. But is S.M.A.R.T. relevant for SSDs? Asked by paulgreg Yes, they have it, and yes, it’s useful. Flash drives do develop errors over time, usually in the form of bad flash blocks – not unlike bad sectors in regular hard drives. Just like regular hard drives, the drive controller keeps track of these bad blocks [...]

I’ve got an HP D2700 enclosure that I’m looking to shove some 2.5″ SSD drives in. Looking at the prices of HP’s SSD drives vs something like an Intel 710 and even something less ‘enterprisey’, there’s quite a difference in price. I know the HP SSD’s will obviously work, but I’ve heard rumours that buying an Intel/Crucial/whatever SATA SSD, bunging it in an HP 2.5″ caddy and putting it in a D2700 won’t work. Is [...]

I’ve got an HP D2700 enclosure that I’m looking to shove some 2.5″ SSD drives in. Looking at the prices of HP’s SSD drives vs something like an Intel 710 and even something less ‘enterprisey’, there’s quite a difference in price. I know the HP SSD’s will obviously work, but I’ve heard rumours that buying an Intel/Crucial/whatever SATA SSD, bunging it in an HP 2.5″ caddy and putting it in a D2700 won’t work. Is [...]

I’m trying to move ibdata & ib_logfile on ssd drive. I tried this way, but it don’t work: service mysql stop cd /var/lib/ cp -ra mysql mysql_backup cp -a mysql/ibdata1 mysql/ib_logfile* /ssd_drive/mysql my.cnf looks like this (relevant parts): innodb_log_group_home_dir=/ssd_drive/mysql innodb_data_home_dir=/ssd_drive/mysql After all changes I get following errors: InnoDB: Unable to lock /ssd_drive/mysql/ibdata1, error: 13 InnoDB: Check that you do not already have another mysqld process Do I need to remove some lock files, or there [...]

Has anyone had any success at all with any PCIx SSD cards around the 200GB+ mark under FreeNAS 8 or OpenIndiana? Specifically either of these platforms because of ZFS support for which we’d be using it as a L2ARC cache. I can confirm with FreeNAS that the OCZ RevoDrive 3 seems to be a no go, but there may be other cards that do work. I should point out that I’m not interested in brand [...]

We’ve started to deploy SSD drives to our developers workstations. At this moment we’re having the unpleasant surprise that the systems using the new SSDs often freeze, with the HDD activity led blinking or being continuously on. Benchmarks shows read speeds around 180 MB/s, but write speeds around 5 MB/s. All developers are using Windows 7 Enterprise, 64 bit, SP1. The SSDs are Kingston SV200S3128G. One of our developers suggested (based on his experience) the [...]

The morning, the following scary scenario happened: I woke up my Windows system Typed in my username and got an error (something like “could not load security xxx”, but unsure of exact wording) System auto-restarted after cliking OK It didn’t boot up anymore to the SSD with Windows 7 OS (I have another disk I can boot to, but that doesn’t see the disk either). Obviously, this happened right after I instantiated a backup procedure, [...]