What's a good SSD make and model for WAN Accelerator server?

[cparker4486]

Hello,

I've only ever purchased consumer-grade SSDs (Intel or Samsung) for desktop workloads so I have little knowledge and no experience with enterprise-grade SSDs. Based on the type of workload that a WAN Accelerator would experience, what would be a good drive to get? I expect to get at least 250GB drive.

This drive will be dedicated to serving the cache. The OS will either be on a standalone drive or RAID 1.

Thanks!

[tsightler]

My opinion is that the Intel DC S3700 is the best drive because of it's exceptional endurance, latency, and IOP capabilties. but it is quite expensive. A lower cost option is the S3500, but the write IOPS are roughly 1/3rd (they're still pretty good though).

I've also heard good things about some of the OCZ enterprise devices, but I think those are quite expensive as well.

[dellock6]

I agree on the Intel models, both 3700 and 3500 are good choices, has Tom stated the 3700 in the best one, having also high write performances (and they are needed by WAN accelerator). Also, if you can still find them around, the previous generation named 520 are good ones.

About OCZ honestly I heard horrible stories about bad endurance and sudden failures. Among the several vendors offering server-side caching solutions (PernixData, FlashSoft, VMware with its vFRC) they all suggest Intel.

Luca.

[Gostev]

I have heard horrible stories about each and every SSD vendor. I do feel that vendors with cheaper offerings have more of those stories, because they use low-endurance flash chips, and this cannot be good for reliability. I myself have been using mid-range OCZ SSD drives for years now, without a single failure so far.

[tsightler]

I've never really heard anything horribly bad about OCZ enterprise SSDs like the Talos 2 series. Sure, they sometimes fail suddenly, but that a little bit of the nature of SSD. I'm not a big "benchmark" person (real world rarely aligns with benchmarks), but they can be useful as a reference so the data available at Storage Review is probably the best collection I've seen, although I'd be interested in others.

http://www.storagereview.com/reviews/enterprise/ssd

[joergr]

Assumed there is no absolute need for sas interface (may be needed especially when designing highly redundant w2012/r2 smbv3 scale out file servers with storage spaces, jbods and sas) and assumed you don´t need extreme low latency under really extreme workloads (like a pro hitachi ssd could handle), the intel s3700 is (in my very personal opinion) one of the most enduring(!) and fast sata ssd drives available. So - totally agree with you.

Best regards,
Joerg