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Old 05-25-2014, 11:16 AM  
milambur
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If you build a server you usually want fast reliable disks that can take the wear of being on 24/7. SSD is still fairly untested by enterprise standards and is known to have a more limited lifespan. The only alternative for many applications are mechanical enterprise drives at either 10K or 15K rpm, they usually come in sizes 146GB, 300GB, 450GB, 600GB and 900GB. There are larger enterprise drives, but they are as slow as consumer drives and won't do for many applications.

Storage is usually the main performance bottleneck for servers. SSD works great when the applications primarily requires reading from the disk, but if there is a need to write large amounts of data to the drives, SSD will fail a lot faster than a mechanical HDD. SSD will eventually take over in both the server and SAN environment, but as long as reliable SSD disks are as expensive, they are not a viable option for many.

SAN is good in that you separate storage from the actual servers and can scale easier, but it still relies on the same type of disks. Good SAN hardware solutions is usually pretty expensive as well.
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