[OmniOS-discuss] Irregularly scheduled SSD survey :)

[Paul B. Henson]

On 3/25/2013 12:30 PM, Paul B. Henson wrote:
> It seems like it's been a while since there's been an SSD discussion;
> I'm in the market for a few and was wondering if anybody had any new
> favorites, or updated information about any previous candidates.

I promised somebody I would post a summary of my survey, and while I 
didn't get as wide a set of results as I'd hoped for, here it is.

For ZIL, there don't seem to be very many SSD's that have power failure 
protection, the only ones I could really confirm as having it were 
Intel. Supposedly OCZ has some enterprise drives with power failure 
protection, but I could not determine which ones.

The Intel DC S3700 is a fairly recent device, priced at 100G/$250
and 200G/$500.

The Intel 910 Series is actually a PCIe card, not a SATA device, priced 
at 400G/$2000.

The older Intel 320 is still available, priced at 120G/$200.

Then there's the STEC ZeusRAM, in SATA form factor but not really an 
SSD, for $2300/8G.

Performance wise, from top to bottom, I think it is ZeusRAM, Intel 910, 
Intel S3700, with the Intel 320 on the bottom.

I think I'm going to go with the 100G Intel DC S3700 for my purposes, 
it's more money than I would like to spend, but the 320 is notably 
slower, and if you're not going to get an SSD with power fail protection 
for ZIL you might as well just disable the ZIL and be done with it.

For rpool/L2ARC, the devices mentioned were:

Intel 520 (60G/$100, 120G/$150, 180G/$205, 240G/$270, 480G/$550)

Samsung 840 Pro (128G/$140, 256G/$220, 512G/$470)

OCZ Vector (128G/$150, 256G/$265, 512G/$540)

Crucial M4 (128G/$120, 256G/$205, 512G/$376)


Overall, the Intel SSD's are not necessarily the best performers or most 
cost-effective, but seem to have the best overall reputation for 
reliability. I think the Samsung had the highest performance.I haven't 
decided yet which one of these I'm going to get; for my needs, I think 
any one of them would be sufficient for rpool/L2ARC.