SSD-HDD RAID?

Yeah, if you're comfortable with non-hardware redundancy, and losing a day's worth of data isn't life and death, raid-1 ssd's seem like overkill.
Having a software mirror of the drive updated every 24 hours is a nice compromise.

Edited by Griffin Ralston - 06 Oct 2010 at 5:24pm

Hey David,

I have a similar setup and dilemma, and so far I haven't heard a simple raid-1 ssd-hdd solution. Most raid arrays require very similar if not exact the same model drives to function correctly.

While it may be possible to somehow get beyond the dissimilarites of the ssd and hdd in this theoretical setup, I'm pretty sure the parity requirements of raid 1 would limit such an array to the lowest common "I/O denominator" meaning you'd be getting hdd performance for ssd+ prices.

While ssd's are still susceptible to the kind of fluke unrecoverable errors that make raid-1 so appealing, the data I've seen suggests these occurrences are orders of magnitude less likely. They do fail, but most of the time its not the catastrophic failure of a hdd, but a slow, controlled failure that can be foreseen using drive utilities and SMART data.

That being said, if you'd still like the peace of mind of traditional raid-1, I think two identical ssd's is going to be your only option.


Hope this helps,

Griffin