Jeff Moden (11/25/2012)
Michael Valentine Jones (11/24/2012)
The 400 GB drive on this link is rated a 35 PB of lifetime writes, so that would mean you could write 1 TB of data on it each day for 98 years, or 20 TB per day for 5 years.Gosh. That seems almost like nothing. Our main database only has 80GB but the legacy code has some pretty bad problems and easily writes several TB a day. Of course, we're working on fixing all of that but I'm sure that larger systems have similar problems and could easily reach 20TB per day especially on TempDB.
If the writes were spread over several drives in an array, that would still absorb a lot of writes. A 12 drive RAID5 array would give you 20 TB a day for 50 years. 5 TB per day would be still be a 20 year lifetime for a single drive. For the type of application that demands that level of performance, I think replacement of the server in 6 years or less would be closer to the norm.
I think the price is still the biggest concern, and Enterprise SSD will still be too expensive for most applications. However, if your application is actually writing 20TB per day, then IO is likely a bottleneck, so it may be worth having a $55,000 10 drive SSD array.
Hopefully, the price of SSD storage will continue to drop to the point of having costs closer to rotating mechanical disks.