Tech Forum

After spending quite a bit of time either recessing files from SL or backing up, I am wondering about switching out the hard drive in our PC to a SSD. I looked at crucial.com and ran the model number and it looks like an SSD would cost about $85. Is this possible/advisable?

What are you looking to improve? If you're concerned over the speed of the backup, you may want to read MLS Backup file size growing. I doubt if switching to a Solid-State Drive is going to help much. Depending on the amount of RAM, a few bucks to add some might be a better plan.

I would not recommend SSD for backup the cost per GB is too high usually running about 4-10 times the cost. You can set up a schedule to backup to a traditional HDD so the time that a backup would take doesn't really matter. Desktop performance is great with SDD, but is not needed on a clerks computer that is used around 3 times a week for a few hours after all it is not meant to be a gaming machine. MLS can be slow at times when moving large amounts of data or running reports, but there could me many factors that can have performance drops like memory, motherboard, connection type, processing, background services.... ect... for the 85 dollars spent on a SSD you can get a 1 TB drive and for backups more is better!

If this is for your personal home PC sure go wild! If this is for a clerks computer don't!

I would recommend 4 SSD set to RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 your choice (theoretically you can have 3 drives fail depending on what ones and you might be able to recover)
That way you get the performance of raid 0 (speed - but if one drive fails everything dies) and some redundancy of RAID 1 (ease of mind - if a drive fails it has a back up) because when SSD fails it is likely to be catastrophic. With HDD you usually get a little warning and you don't really have to worry about firmware bugs misplacing data. I would still store static data on a HDD, and run the OS and Apps from the raid.

I hope this helps you.

If you are really interested in redundancy and backup you can establish RAID 5 - if one drive fails you still have 100% access to the data and if you have drive bays accessible from the outside of the case can even replace a drive without powering down the system. I've had a bad drive on RAID 5 before - I didn't have the fancy cases but after ten minutes of powering down and swapping out the drive the server was back up and running with zero data loss.

aclawson wrote:If you are really interested in redundancy and backup you can establish RAID 5

Given the amount of data involved, I'd suggest simple mirroring. That way you'd only have to add one drive. Going to RAID 5 would require adding two drives.

wrigjef wrote:After spending quite a bit of time either recessing files from SL or backing up, I am wondering about switching out the hard drive in our PC to a SSD. I looked at crucial.com and ran the model number and it looks like an SSD would cost about $85. Is this possible/advisable?

Can you give more details about this? What do you mean by "recessing files"? What does SL stand for? When it comes to the backup, are you talking about the MLS backup feature, or backing up the entire disk somewhere?