Crucial M4, RAID1, no TRIM, long term reliability

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AbRASiON

Senior member
Oct 10, 1999
861
4
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Any comments here? (or recommendations of other forums to try?)

I've got a basic VM box for a small business and I'd like to virtualise their server on the cheap, the server is *nine* years old and the disks seven years old, yet in software raid 5 (ugh) she continues to serve reliably, no disk failures but it's obviously inevitable.

I'm thinking of moving from RAID5 software down to RAID1 hardware. The machine would be regularly backing up via Acronis True image, robocopy scripts, crashplan AND a manual copy of the entire VM once a week so she'll be fine for data backups.

Regardless of that, there's still that desire for a reliable machine. Does anyone know how long RAID1 non TRIM Crucials might run? Even approximately? The disk activity for this server I would say is extremely low for a server (10 users, probably no more than 3gb written to it per day)

Thoughts really appreciated.
 
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ohforfs

Member
Sep 13, 2011
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It depends on the garbage collection - from what I read most SSD's have good GC and Trim isn't as important as it gets hyped.

My concern would be the wear rate on the SSD given all the backing up (reading) you are doing. In that case you might be better off going with Intel or Samsung. We don't really have enough data on any of them to be sure of the long term situation (and Anand states this often too). Crucial are usually pretty solid too, but I would reconsider how you mitigate failure. Maybe a less wearing backup plan?

I'm no expert but those are my first thoughts.

EDIT: Oh, and what is running the raid? Intel fakeraid onboard, raidcard or mdadm or something like that?
 
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AbRASiON

Senior member
Oct 10, 1999
861
4
81
It's some kind of HP fakeraid, the server is a HP Microserver NL40 or N40L.

Does anand still check TRIM quality in reviews?
 
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ohforfs

Member
Sep 13, 2011
35
0
66
He certainly comments on it - I have been trawling through the SSD reviews lately to try and make sense of some stuff and he does talk about TRIM. Check out the review of your drive.

Also, in regard to RAID, I am not sure how reliable the chipset RAID is, though I have run a 4TB RAID 5 on ICH10R for a couple of years - it rebuilds a lot, for no good reason (not an alignment or TRIM issue, I checked) but that is with HDD's.

Just as long as you don't try to access it with anything else and are careful to let it rebuild/verify when it needs to without whacking the power off, it should be ok. If it was me though I would be going with Linux software raid, but that is probably not practical for a customer situation where you aren't managing it directly.

My guess is it will run fine for years, but again, I would think carefully on how to do the backups so that it isn't wearing the drive as much.
 
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