A place for X-25E 64gig in modern machine?

[nk215]

For a very long time I relied on intel X-25E SLC drives to store my important data. Recently I've been slowly replacing them with S37xx drives. As a result, I have a bunch of 64gig X25-E drives.

None of them has more than 1% wear with insignificant write for an SLC. Think about it, I don't have a real reason to replace them, my data is not even 20gig and won't reach 50 gig for another many years.

Are any real use for them in modern hardware?

I am planning to use them instead of the USB sticks for ESXi installations. That would speed up VIB files installation and boot time significantly but other than that, what's the real benefit?

 

[Rand__]

Well that would have been my idea too.
Flash cache maybe? Not sure what the requirements are for that.

 

[pyro_]

Boot drives for servers is about the only use i would have for drives that small at this point. If you have a bunch of them i guess you could do a raid setup with them and use them that way if you really wanted to and had the extra sata ports laying around

 

[StammesOpfer]

Unfortunately the write speed and IOPS is too low in these older drives to be very useful as a cache or log device since SLC would be perfect for that. Small boot drives seem like a good use for them.

 

[RobertFontaine]

esxi, pfsense.

 

[lowfat]

The X25-E had pretty excellent IOPS. It shouldn't be a bottleneck for a home server, that is for sure. If you aren't using 10GbE and FreeNAS, one should definitely be sufficient for an SLOG. If you have a bunch of them (like 5) and are using 10GbE, you could stripe them for an L2ARC.