Thanks to a very kind reader and an awesome ebay deal, I have been able to acquire now 7x Pliant/ Sandisk Lightning SLC SSDs.
4x 200GB Plaint/ Sandisk Lightning
3x 400GB Pliant/ Sandisk Lightning
These are the drives used by NetApp, HP, Dell (+Equalogic) and etc. They use Micron 34nm SLC NAND so in terms of endurance, these things are tanks.
Rated endurance: Unlimited over the 5 year warranty period
There is no write cache so there is nothing stored in RAM in the event of a power failure.
From what I have seen thus far, these are not the fastest drives. On the other hand, with healthy over provisioning and SLC NAND (almost 22% of NAND is for wear leveling) they seem to be fairly durable drives.
Another benefit is that they are SAS drives so one does not worry about SATA-SAS tunnels.
Here is the kicker - they are not that much more expensive than SATA drives. For example these are $350 OBO for the 400GB drives (3 years old): Pliant Lightning Enterprise Class SSD 400GB LB406S 6GB s SAS 2 5 | eBay
That is $0.875/GB (usable.) These may seem expensive but are in the ballpark of higher end consumer SATA drives.
4x 200GB Plaint/ Sandisk Lightning
3x 400GB Pliant/ Sandisk Lightning
These are the drives used by NetApp, HP, Dell (+Equalogic) and etc. They use Micron 34nm SLC NAND so in terms of endurance, these things are tanks.
Rated endurance: Unlimited over the 5 year warranty period
There is no write cache so there is nothing stored in RAM in the event of a power failure.
From what I have seen thus far, these are not the fastest drives. On the other hand, with healthy over provisioning and SLC NAND (almost 22% of NAND is for wear leveling) they seem to be fairly durable drives.
Another benefit is that they are SAS drives so one does not worry about SATA-SAS tunnels.
Here is the kicker - they are not that much more expensive than SATA drives. For example these are $350 OBO for the 400GB drives (3 years old): Pliant Lightning Enterprise Class SSD 400GB LB406S 6GB s SAS 2 5 | eBay
That is $0.875/GB (usable.) These may seem expensive but are in the ballpark of higher end consumer SATA drives.