Message-ID: <4E49B0A0.2060705@2ndQuadrant.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:49:52 -0400
From: Greg Smith <greg@2ndQuadrant.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US;
	rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20110702 Icedove/3.0.11
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "pgsql-performance@postgresql.org" <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Reports from SSD purgatory
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

News update for anyone else who's trapped like me, waiting for a fix to 
the Intel 320 SSD bug where they can truncate themselves to 8MB.  Over 
the weekend Intel has announced a firmware fix for the problem is done, 
and is due to ship "within the next two weeks":  
http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121

On the larger SSD reliability front, Tom's Hardware surveyed heavy SSD 
users they're friendly with who use Intel drives.  The most interesting 
data came from Softlayer:  
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html

This supports two claims I made before based on my private data that 
were controversial:

-Annualized SSD failure rates are not significantly lower than 
traditional drives in the first couple of years.  Jury is still out on 
whether they will spike upwards starting at 3 years as mechanical ones do.

-The most common source of dead drives is sudden, catastrophic 
electronics failure.  These are not predicted by SMART, and have nothing 
to do with hitting the drive's wear limits.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us