>
> It might be tempting to use a consumer-grade SSD due to the significant
> cost savings, but the money saved is vapor. They may be OK for a dev
> environment, but you *will* pay in downtime in a production environment.
> Unlike regular hard drives where the difference between consumer and
> enterprise drives is performance and a few features, SSDs are different
> animals.
>
> SSDs wear something like a salt-shaker. There's a fairly definite number
> of writes that they are good for, and when they are gone, the drive will
> fail. Like a salt shaker, when the salt is gone, you won't get salt any
> more no matter how you shake it.
>
In theory, SMART is supposed to be a reliable indicator of impending "salt exhaustion". Have you had any drives "run
outof salt" where SMART did not let you know in advance? If SMART does actually perform as expected there should be no
downtime,just swap of the drive in the array and wait for the rebuild. I'd expect the cheapest consumer drives to fail
suddenlyand without warning, but I've never had cause to find out so far...
James