I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks. So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..
I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion. It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.
Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access. Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard disks). That is slowly beginning to change. I suspect that within five years SSD drives in RAID arrays for database servers will be just as common as standard disk arrays are today.
Pliant Technology announced today what they call an Enterprise grade series of SSD drives that they claim has twice the throughput of the leading competitors. Computer World has a good writeup of the announcement here. Interesting technology that Pliant claims can produce a maximum of 180,000 IOPS from a single 3.5″ SSD drive. While undoubtedly expensive, for those who are I/O bound with few other options this could be a God-send.
Be prepared . . the time is coming sooner than you think that SSD drives are your main system drives and traditional hard drives are used for backup.
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