Solid State Drives.
 

Has anyone had any experience with running a mud on SSDs yet? Our biggest bottleneck is disk i/o so quite excited by the potential in these, but have heard various anecdotes about reliability and how long the data can actually be retained on an SSD.

Re: Solid State Drives.
 

Never tried it myself, but EVE Online seems to do ok by any account.

Re: Solid State Drives.
 

I'm no SSD expert, so take what I write with a grain of salt, but....

There are multiple types of SSDs, but they kind of boil down to Flash-based vs. RAM-based. Flash-based SSDs:
RAM-based SSDS:

RAM-based SSDs are basically superior in every way for performance. Flash SSDs are becoming pretty reasonable price-wise though. My latest laptop has a 64 gig Flash SSD drive in it, for instance, and I think it only cost $400 extra or something. (And man does Windows start up quickly with it!).

A quick google search isn't showing me any reliable pricing for RAM-based SSDs, but when we looked at using SSDs for Iron Realms I remember that they were at least 25x more expensive per byte stored than Flash SSDs (which are themselves considerably more expensive per byte stored than conventional HDs). That was a couple of years ago though, and I don't know how the market has changed (I know that Flash-based SSDs have been dropping quickly in price but have no idea what has been happening to RAM-based.)

--matt

Re: Solid State Drives.
 

Found some pricing from 2007. The RamSan 400 (RAM-based SSD), with a 128 gig capacity, was running about $90,000 for a base unit.

Ouch.

--matt

Re: Solid State Drives.
 

Ouch! Thanks for the info.

Sounds like a RAM based SSD won't be a viable mainstream option for some time yet.

Oh well, back to trusty old zlib.

Re: Solid State Drives.
 

Peanuts!

Oh wait, that was a comma and not a decimal point?

Damn.

Re: Solid State Drives.
 

It has been almost a year since we looked at this.

How much have prices come down?