Re: Making the most of memory?

Guy Rouillier wrote:

> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
>> I assume you're talking about solid state drives?  They have their
>> uses, but for most use cases, having plenty of RAM in your server will
>> be a better way to spend your money.  For certain high throughput,
>> relatively small databases (i.e. transactional work) the SSD can be
>> quite useful.
>
>
> Unless somebody has changes some physics recently, I'm not
> understanding the recent discussions of SSD in the general press.
> Flash has a limited number of writes before it becomes unreliable.  On
> good quality consumer grade, that's about 300,000 writes, while on
> industrial grade it's about 10 times that.  That's fine for mp3
> players and cameras; even professional photographers probably won't
> rewrite the same spot on a flash card that many times in a lifetime.
> But for database applications, 300,000 writes is trivial. 3 million
> will go a lot longer, but in non-archival applications, I imagine even
> that mark won't take but a year or two to surpass.
>
I think the original poster was talking about drives like these:
http://www.texmemsys.com/

Basically, they're not using Flash, they're just big ol' hunks of
battery-backed RAM.  Not unlike a 10GB battery backed buffer for your
raid, except there is no raid.

Brian