I'm in need to upgrade my MySQL machine, as currently I am running 2x SATA 7200rpm drives in RAID0. This of course is quite dangerous incase one of the drives fails.
As I do not need too much storage (all my db's together are about 20 – 25gb), I have been thinking about getting 2 SSD's (80 or 120gb) and putting them in RAID1 setup, so incase one of the SSD's fails, there is a backup present.
Price wise, I can also go for a RAID10 setup with 4x SATA drives. But I think 2 SSD's in RAID1 will still perform better.
For a heavily used MySQL machine, do you think the latest generation SSD's are reliable enough yet? And would this be a recommendable setup?
Best Answer
That depends on the environment, and the disks you use. You're probably wanting to look at "Enterprise Flash Drives" rather than SSD. I would make the distinction as the longevity difference is significant.
This article discusses viability of EFDs in enterprise environments. This one discusses longevity of Seagate's "Pulsar" drive. According to Anandt's math, the 200TB version offers about 6 TB of writes before it fails, assuing 4k random read/write over 5 years. The smaller drives add up to less.
You may wish to check the comment string on Chopper 3's post in this question, he has a real world example that may be pertinent to you.
The long and short of it is that it depends on just how write-heavy your environment is. Remember that the wear on SSD/EFD drives is from writes not reads, so if people are just reading from your database, You could conceivably get 2-5 years out of your RAID.
You will get very good performance out of the raid. Switching from spinning disk to SSD has been the single most noticeable performance change in my home PC in the past two years.