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Comment by serverascode | Hacker News Reader

I have 1.7TB of FusionIO PCI SSD at work and it's not even doing that much right now.

These guys should open their wallets and get more than a little bit of SSD, prob PCIe, plus max out on RAM. 96GB is what most would start at now in a larger HP server.

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Those drives still cost about 20k or so to purchase, for only about a 25% increase for reads and 10% for writes (http://blog.serverfault.com/2011/02/09/our-storage-decision/) why would we pay that extra for so little gain?

Also, with FusionIO you are putting all of your eggs in one basket - drive wise. If that card dies you are done. In short we don't _need_ the FusionIO so why would we put out that kind of money for it?

Also we went to 96GB about a year or so ago when we setup those boxes it was a reasonable amount of memory to put in now - we are maxing the thing out at 288GB now.

Did you guys do better than about $13/usable GB of storage? When I was shopping, 6x Intel 710s cost about that, and that's about what Fusion IO storage seems to go for.

We'll end up paying about that for the 710s, but you have look at what we're getting for the same price. Fusion IO card dies: we're dead in the water. It takes 2-3 of the Intel 710s (in a RAID 10 like they'll be) dying to do the same. Given that the IO of our storage isn't close to being a factor, we'll always stick with the much more robust route for the same price.

Ah. Well if your RAID controller dies, you're dead in the water no? My understanding of the Fusion cards is that they're roughly as resilient as a RAIDed SSD setup.

That doesn't really happen, it's an extraordinary event that a raid controller dies. But can it happen? Sure, anything can happen...that's why we have an identical hot backup server only minutes behind on the database for just such an occasion.

Being of the sysadmin sort, my immediate thought is if the memory is going to downclock because of the number of DIMMs populated. Of course, this only happens if it's an Intel box. And you also may not care. With only 288GB you can definitely buy some new hardware before having to scale out the number of boxes. They make 1TB of RAM machines now...

While you mentioned SAN storage being really expensive (and the price changes depending who you are), you really can't beat the caching modules. I've got a Netapp with 512GB of read cache, and you can buy them in smaller sizes.

Have you guys noticed a degradation of SSD performance? I've never used SSDs in a machine before, and I know Anandtech always writes about the performance degrading after the drive gets mostly full. I just wondered if you've run across the problem in production.

I don't think they cost $20k now, but I don't actually know. That said, I have 3 in a big IBM server and the whole server, including the FIO cards was just under $60k a year ago. Maybe IBM threw in the server and external storage enclosure half filled with drives for free when we bought 3 cards...?

Also you can mirror them.

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