[AccessD] SSDs and BE storage

I'm sorry that you felt my remarks were unkind. You have done your own
research, and have taken steps to mitigate the risks by limiting how your
SSDs are used. And you are planning for failure with a robust backup scheme
using traditional HDDs.

Still, my first experience with an SSD out of the box was that the firmware
had a critical bug, which required an update that wasn't available, because
the maker needed a lot of time to test the revision. It seems likely that
the real cause is that the drive, being a consumer level product, didn't
have enough capacitance built-in to shut down gracefully during a power
outage. Maybe we made a poor choice, but the device was from a dominant
player in the industry. Not a confidence builder.

Also, some of your own comments don't bolster your overall glowing
endorsement. To wit: the SSD's with the 34 micron chips are good but the new
28 micron chips are bad? That sounds like caveat emptor to me. Problems with
scaling down and firmware issues sound to me like indicators of a technology
that is still not mature enough to be suitable as drop-in replacements for
HDDs in a broad range of server applications.

And yes, the one source I quoted does sound like a guy fishing for
consulting work, but you conveniently neglected to criticize my other
reference, who said things more central to my point, and who seems more
credible.

Certainly, the technology will mature, and adoption rates will climb.
Operating systems that optimize for SSDs will become more popular. Right
now, for our server installation, I'm content to wait it out.

-Ken