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TAG | ssd

Dec/09

14

Civic Duty

603px-Oglaigh_na_heireann

I’ve been called to serve my country as a juror in a case. Today i attended and was selected for a juror panel so there won’t be anything juicy here for a bit. However if you are interested in the SSD’s the new HP server arrived on Friday along with the additional 2 SSD’s.

The server itself is a DL380G6 with the Xeon 5550 Processor. I purchased 4 SSD’d in total for a RAID 5 configuration with 1 Spare (just in case of failure, i’m wary of the reliability of the SSD’s). The HP 2.5″ SAS/SATA front bay caddy’s won’t be delivered until tomorrow/Wednesday. At that point we are installing Server 2003 Enterprise as the server has to run a legacy Borland Interbase 7.x database.

In other tech news i purchased myself a Nokia N85 and i have to say the prelimiary findings are that this phone is superb.
I’m also looking into setting up a test OCS 2007 R2, this may take some time however and will most likely be next year.

I hope to get more onto this in the coming days but its all trial dependant, so stay tuned.

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Corsair SSD x64 Extreme

Finally, they arrived, 2 Corsair X64 SSD’s with my name on them. As all new SSD drives are 2.5″ i will need to locate some 3.5″ to 2.5″ adaptors and will post a link when i get it. However the SATA II Raid controller never showed up so I’m going to make do for now with my Desktop, in order to begin the tests i must first explain the rig i am using and the reasons.

My Home PC is water-cooled and quite the effort filled task to undo drives and try not have my ICH9 Raid array decide to Rebuild itself, or worse run a check and repair which last time i ran it took over 24 hours. So without the RAID SATA 2 card (Adaptec) i had to run some tests using my Work PC.

Dell Optiplex 755
Windows Server 2008 R2
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500
8GB DDR2
ATI HD 2400 Pro 256MB

In order to run a benchmark i installed server 2008 R2 (trial) on a 250GB SATA 2 Drive as a 34.47 GB Partition.
I added the Hyper V Role, updated windows and ran a backup to a second drive.
This backup took a minor 2 minutes for a complete File and System Image backup. I then installed a single SSD and restored the image onto this drive.

A Table of Comparisons:

  SATA2 250GB HDD  SATA2 64GB SSD
Boot Time (to Login Screen) 45 18
Login (locally) 9 5
Idle after login & open SRV MGR 26 6
Open Internet Explorer 8 1
Chkdsk (0 Errors) 16 6
Defrag (0% Fragmentation) 22 22
Backup 2 mins < 2 mins
Restore 2 2
Shutdown 12 10

 

Some simple Disk Benching software showed the SSD’s to be over 600% more efficient at Random Disk Seeks on a simulated busy database server.
However i am not continuing these tests as the Adaptec SATA Raid Card arrived on Friday and on Monday i should have a new test server (HP ML350 G4) with SCSI 320 disks for comparison in RAID 0/1/10.

*Update*

2 of these SSD’s have failed. Corsair have replaced both but this failure rate has knocked a hole in my belief that they can do the job.
I had put 4 of them in a production server and now i’ve gone back to SAS drives.

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Nov/09

24

COD: MW2

It stole my day

It stole my evening!

No server work or nothing done just COD:MW2. Although i have been trying unsuccessfully to fix my XBOX 360 while attempting to watercool it. I guess i should do 1 at a time. Also my new mouse finally arrived in Komplett and was shipped yesterday so i’m hoping to get in tomorrow, if not it will be Thursday. Expect a glowing review. SSD’s wont be in until Thursday so midweek is a cracking failure so far.

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