Until recently, Dell et all would only provide slc drives for servers.
It appears the winds have shifted and now the cheaper mlc drives are avail for servers.
In a sql environment, will mlc give acceptable life? And in event of fail, well the raid mirror stay up long enough for us to swap out the dead drive?
Looking for real world experiences of this kind.
Thx!
Depends on what you're doing to the SSDs. Today, MLC versus SLC doesn't matter as much as buying the appropriate drives with the right attributes for your use case and environment. If that means "write heavy", "read optimized", "low latency", whatever...
See: Are SSD drives as reliable as mechanical drives (2013)?
But why complicate your thinking? If a drive fails, does it matter why? Use RAID, take and test backups and ensure you monitor your hardware and RAID array status. Or better yet, use drives from your server hardware vendor that match the characteristics of your workload.
Buy the SSD drive that matches your expected workload.
From the Dell SSD FAQ:
The use of an endurance management algorithm ensures that sufficient Program/Erase (P/E) cycles are available for the warranty time period of the drive. The firmware will limit writes if a drive is written heavily.
If you buy the a drive not intended for a write heavy IO load, but your usage pattern is, the firmware will limit writes to ensure you don't kill the drive while still under warranty... That will kill your application instead, but that's not Dell's problem.
Assuming you keep it under warranty, if it ever fails, they'll replace it. The expected lifespan is their problem.
