PCA Forums

Ok came home this week to find my File server dead. Inspected its death and fount it to be the main OS 80 gig HD has clicks of doom and it wont boot.

So, Seeing how I have to replace this drive with something... would a SSD be ok to run 24/7? The HD that failed has over 8 years of nearly 24/7 service. Can you run a SSD for long periods and it be ok? Or should I just get another mechanical drive and toss it in?

Money is no object but I would not want to waste it. I don't need any kind of performance out of this drive because it only has the OS on it. The actual storage is 5 1TB drives in raid 5 on a card.

Thanks.

If you got 8 years out of that old drive I'd say you did alright.

Well SSDs haven't been around long enough for us to know for sure how reliable they are, but I have a 4 year old Intel SSD that's still working like a champ.

In theory they are rated for as many hours as a spindle drive.

However if boot times or load times isn't an issue, then the cost of an SSD is not worth it, unless you get a good deal on one. I have a boot SSD in all my PCs except my server. The only reason I MIGHT upgrade the boot drive on the server is I host a couple of Minecraft servers on it, and they benefit greatly from running on an SSD.

What I would do is buy as SMALL a spindle drive as you can find. Under 500Gb for sure. The smaller they are, the more reliable because the magnetic regions aren't crammed as tightly.

Something like this 320Gb Scorpio Blacl which is a rock solid drive. 75% of the reviews are 5 eggs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136280

i have a 24/7 desktop that has had a small (and very cheap) ssd as the OS drive for about 1.5 yrs now without a blip. unless you get a lemon, i think most namebrand ssd's will be fine for you. the new ones have extremely high read/write lifetime counts now, so that shouldn't be an issue either. or, if money is no object, you could go with two small mirrored drives for redundancy...

The SSD would help for some things, but in your case I doubt it will be much of a difference maker. I'd might even consider a 5400RPM drive just so there is less heat and lessens the chance of overheating.

You can usually run into some decent deals on smaller ones, for under $50, and 90gig ones for under $100.

The boot speed/performance is quite good, even on older SATA controllers. Most servers don't need it unless they have to cache a lot of information, otherwise once they are booted they are good to go.

Oops, typo. That Scorpio I linked to is a 320Gb not a 32Gb. You'd be hard pressed to find anything new much smaller for a reasonable price.

Yeah. It was running 2003 server. I think ill just buy another spindle drive for it and be done. probably just get whatever I can find at BB so I can get it up and running again ASAP. WD green. All the drives in the raid array are Greens.

Thanks for the input.