it’s unix, not eunuchs

Solid State Drives are on the way to Sun.  Some of us in mid-range computing have been dying for this development to come to prime time and frankly I’m excited.  Currently, most Solaris servers are using Solaris Disksuite or Veritas in order to mirror the root drive.  This provides the ability for the computer to still boot and return to service, even if one of the hard drives has failed.

But if you had a SSD for a rootdisk, it would consume about 25% of the power that the current drives do.  Also, they’re much faster, cutting boot time in half.  And ultimately the most important feature is that they last 7 times longer between failures.  Statistics were taken from this post.

Also, SSDs tend to not actually actually catastrophically fail instead they begin to throw more and more read errors.  This error rate would be accommodated for by any modern filesystem and would result in a minor slow down and an error being thrown to the kernel.  After enough gradual degradation, I’m sure Sun would agree that the drive is toast and then agree to replace it.

But think about this for a moment, it’s entirely possible that SSDs would become the defacto platinum spark plug for servers.  If a Solid State rootdisk lasts seven times longer than current rootdisks, it’s entirely possible that most Sun servers will meet their End Of Life schedule before the hard drive actually even fails.

I’d love to talk to anyone who’s had some hands on time with some of this hardware.

I use John’s Background Switcher to rotate my desktop images.  It has this cool feature that John calls a snapshot scrapbook where it downloads images from flickr and then creates a desktop that looks like someone threw a bunch of polaroids on your desk.  It’s pretty cool, plus it’s free and supports dual monitors.  Check out the image: