• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

SSD reliability any better yet? Need help deciding..

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
ziggo0

ziggo0

Member
​
Joined
Apr 27, 2004
I'm putting together a server that is going to be co-located, it's going to be a game server primarily with 10 to 23 clients. I was looking into a RAID10 setup with 4x500gb for speed, and redundancy. However, the game in question is extremely I/O intensive and have save files ranging from the 10k files to 100k+ files. These files are quite small and get read/written an aweful lot - so I was considering SSD RAID1. The board for the server has SATA 3.0Gbps. I would also have say a 2tb drive as an active backup drive, possibly 2x2tb raid1 as well for more redundancy. Any recommendations or ideas? Price isn't really a concern, but I'm not looking to spend a small fortune either (compared to the cost of 4x higher end hard drives).
 
How many games will be installed? Which ones? How many of those will just be dedicated servers and not full games? 10-23 "clients" as in customers, or connected game clients at once?
 
The server in question will only be hosting Minecraft. Each client will have his own server running on the box. The client renting a server from me could have 0 to say 12 players connected to his server, pending the package they get (more RAM = more slots). Save files for each server are generally no larger than 1gb in size, rarely going over 100mb for most people. I won't need THAT MUCH storage space for the SSDs, probably 128gb would do easily. Any backups would go on a 2tb raid1. May seem like a lot for one box to handle but the game is not latency intensive, it mostly requires some CPU horsepower for generating the world and when that's done and over with, it requires little to nothing in that department.
 
ziggo0 said:
The server in question will only be hosting Minecraft. Each client will have his own server running on the box. The client renting a server from me could have 0 to say 12 players connected to his server, pending the package they get (more RAM = more slots). Save files for each server are generally no larger than 1gb in size, rarely going over 100mb for most people. I won't need THAT MUCH storage space for the SSDs, probably 128gb would do easily. Any backups would go on a 2tb raid1. May seem like a lot for one box to handle but the game is not latency intensive, it mostly requires some CPU horsepower for generating the world and when that's done and over with, it requires little to nothing in that department.
Click to expand...

So with your maximum of 23 clients, you'd still be looking at miniscule storage demands. Personally, I'd go with 4 60GB SSDs in RAID 10, and use an online backup service or just copy the files to your box at home. A 2TB RAID 1 in the same box is way overkill and pretty pointless IMHO.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227550 gets my vote.
 
ratbuddy said:
So with your maximum of 23 clients, you'd still be looking at miniscule storage demands. Personally, I'd go with 4 60GB SSDs in RAID 10, and use an online backup service or just copy the files to your box at home. A 2TB RAID 1 in the same box is way overkill and pretty pointless IMHO.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227550 gets my vote.
Click to expand...

Maximum of 23 clients yes, but say each client had 10 players on their respective server, so it would add up to a I/O nightmare. I was just trying to see if SSD would provide me with the reliability and performance I desire. I was reading up on the Corsair C300, they seem like pretty solid drives but I read that a few samples in reviewers hands died..? Also the 2tb drives I have a handful of already, so those wouldn't be added into the cost ;) - thanks for your insight though, I'll read more into the Vertex 2 - people seem to say it's a pretty solid drive.
 
Well RAID-10 or RAID-5 would be great with 4 60GB SSD's. If you really want to maintain high I/O a really good RAID card would do a lot of good. The performance of chipset RAID isn't always too good. SSD's pretty reliable from what I know. However, small constant read/writes can wreak havoc on an SSD and will slowly degrade performance. Not sure if that problem still exists, but I am pretty sure garbage collection, wear-leveling space, and TRIM help a lot. If you do want SSD's than some OCZ Vertex 2 50GB drives would work as they have more space reserved for wear-leveling and I'd assume would last longer.
 
Sadly the files that are written are very small, usually a few kb at most and there are thousands upon thousands of them. I thought TRIM support was suppose to alleviate degrading?
 
I am not really an expert, just throwing in my two cents. I think you'd be fine with SSD's, I know they're durable, not so sure about server-grade reliable though. The great thing is if you do lose one, it'll be really fast to rebuild the RAID with a good card. I think you should go ahead and make a post over at OCZ forums, they know everything about SSD's =)
 
ziggo0 said:
Maximum of 23 clients yes, but say each client had 10 players on their respective server, so it would add up to a I/O nightmare. I was just trying to see if SSD would provide me with the reliability and performance I desire. I was reading up on the Corsair C300, they seem like pretty solid drives but I read that a few samples in reviewers hands died..? Also the 2tb drives I have a handful of already, so those wouldn't be added into the cost ;) - thanks for your insight though, I'll read more into the Vertex 2 - people seem to say it's a pretty solid drive.
Click to expand...

What mobo you gonna be using? You might be better off just making a giant ramdisk and backing it up to SSD :beer:
 
ratbuddy said:
What mobo you gonna be using? You might be better off just making a giant ramdisk and backing it up to SSD :beer:
Click to expand...

That sounds like a good idea lol. Just run some VM's with RAM disks and run backups to your 2TB drives you have 'laying around'. If you have the typical dual socket server board than 64GB or so of ram should do it.
 
I am thinking of getting a SSD if they are reliable. Would I have to replace them every 2-3yrs? If so, I will just stick w/ my mechanical drives
 
With game servers, your bottleneck would be the network itself as opposed to the storage devices. I don't think your clients will see much of an improvement. Perhaps you can use it as a marketing bullet point.
 
Ramdisks... Hmm. Is it possible to have some sort of OS "image" or similar stored on a SSD or mechanical drive, then when you boot the computer, it autoloads the image to the ram disk and boots that. That way you would never make writes to the SSD. Or are you guys talking about something else?
 
Well what we are talking about it is booting just like normal from any hdd (doesn't really matter) and then running VM's on ram disks that would have the actual clients running on them and then backing up that data to SSD's or fast HDD's.

Btw I'd like to note that I have an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB and a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB and I don't notice a HUGE difference in performance. The SSD obviously has really "snappy" performance because of its almost nonexistent latency but overall the OCZ's 250mb/s burst rate is pretty close to the F3's 160mb/s. I honestly think you'd be better off with some F3E (enterprise RAID version of my drive). Besides like SuperNade said the network will bottle neck you as well.
 
As I said before, this game isn't really latency intensive, so a 10mbps uplink port can handle a good amount of players. It's the constant reading/writing of the world that causes the biggest bottleneck...which is why I was considering SSD for it's ridiculous I/O capabilities. The motherboard is a Supermicro X8sti. Those 60gb vertex 2's in raid0 with a 1 or 2tb raid1 for data backups would serve me well, I would be getting a raid controller though.
 
I've been playing minecraft on my rig with installed on my OCZ Vertex 2 60GB and it plays great, but still has the 'stuttering' that all players seem to have. And that's with just me and occasionally someone else. You might want to wait for him to come out with better versions that will load chunks better and not stutter. Its hard to say how effective it will be considering it's using the JVM...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

B
mini-ITX build - need help completing build specs
2
Replies
37
Views
3K
beyondinfinity
B
deathman20
NAS upgrade... looking into a new Synology unit (what are others using?)
2
Replies
26
Views
4K
PanteraGSTK
PanteraGSTK
K
Help with new gaming / general use build, $2500
2 3
Replies
51
Views
2K
koontz946
K
T
Need help deciding my next upgrade path.
Replies
4
Views
369
bob4933
B
G
Need help deciding between two builds
Replies
12
Views
778
wingman99
W
Back