SSD file server for work?

[Coup27]

You don't put consumer desktop SSD in a business server.

Period.

Really?

It's more intelligent to calculate the workload and make an assessment on the longevity of a consumer SSD in a business environment than to rule them out entirely because they are not "business class".

 

[Ayah]

Really?

It's more intelligent to calculate the workload and make an assessment on the longevity of a consumer SSD in a business environment than to rule them out entirely because they are not "business class".

That's a bad example, the X-25E's are enterprise and SLC.

But if you take care in monitoring, you can definitely use consumer drives in a "business"(enterprise) environment. They're dirt cheap (especially compared to dual port SAS drives), so you can usually just run many times more consumer drives, and have even better redundancy.

 

[Hellhammer]

That's a bad example, the X-25E's are enterprise and SLC.

We use different drives for different purposes

Our infrastructure is split up between front end application servers and back end database servers. With the exception of the boxes that serve our images, most of our front end app servers don't really stress IO all that much. The three 12-core virtualized servers at the front end would normally be fine with some hard drives, however we instead decided to go with mainstream SSDs to lower the risk of a random mechanical failure. We didn't need the endurance of an enterprise drive in these machines since they weren't being written to all that frequently, but we needed reliable drives. Although quite old by today's standards, we settled on 160GB Intel X25-M G2s but partitioned the drives down to 120GB in order to ensure they'd have a very long lifespan.

 

[Ayah]

Yeah, I should probably have read it, only looked at the performance comparison table.

 

[PsiStar]

I have only worked on the periphery of IT/network admin. I have & do work in engineering and have sometimes been given (under duress) those responsibilities for engineering departments. From that experience and working with various CAD programs I can say that mechanical CAD saturates the drive channel for all but the simplest of models. Always.

As a result, the convenient method of centralized file storage and working from that central server ... sucks. Not sure this is OP's situation, but it sounds like it might be.

A typical solution is having software that controls access providing a sign out process for model files. Typically this transfers the necessary files to the workstation's local drive and sets flags so that no one else may check out the files except for viewing purposes. OP has not stated whether they use this or not, but it is pretty fundamental as it optimizes thru put with access & update control.

But with 22-25 users (all autocad??) a gigabit network will certainly be helpful but transfers will still be painfully slow. That is a lot of CAD! What cannot be measured are the work arounds people tend towards to avoid the system slow downs. Faster network can just cause more traffic as people tend to use it more by dropping the work arounds. In the past I have threatened to go to fiber channel, but all of that hardware is ludicrously expensive. Alternative, and typical could be additional servers on separate networks to distribute the network traffic.

 

[tweakboy]

If you get a quality SSD the writes it keeps getting will be ok and not botch the SSD.
hint... samsung 840 or M4 .... Buy 256GB and array away.

 

[BrightCandle]

SVN (or another source control system that supports locks) using locking and SSDs in the local users desktops might well prove to be a better overall performing solution then.