Atomicorp

I would love to hear some opinions or experiences with using SSD's for a web hosting environment. I've read that their performance can degrade over time (because of write amplification?) and that reliability varies significantly across different SSD manufacturers and models.

Also, does the ASL kernel have any impact on the use of SSDs? Is Kernel support for the TRIM function actually required on Linux systems?

We only have a few servers with both ASL and SSD's, but our experience is extremely positive.

Also, does the ASL kernel have any impact on the use of SSDs?

No adverse impact.

Disk I/O is currently the main thing limiting the performance of our current servers. SSDs in any role would massivle improve things for us. It is definitely something we'll be looking at when we next replace our hardware (2 or 3 years time).

The problem with SSDs in a server environment is that you may/will/definitely/possibly* have to replace them on a regular and quite likely fixed interval (* take your pick!)

While a rust-based spinning disk may or may not fail during a server's lifetime, an SSD is highly likely to degrade to an unusable point before the server hardware is EOL.

Recent improvements in the technology have been quite remarkable, however. Modern enterprise drives seems to have very long quoted lives (based on write-cycles) but cost an absolute fortune.

I'd be looking at using a smaller SSD in some form of cache role, personally. In that way it doesn't matter if it degrades - your data is still safe on your mirrored spinning disks.

Ive played around with them in gaming environments (linux of course), and they do make improvements in boot and startup time. Not that I'm trying to sell anyone on SSD's here, but if you wanted to speed up boot time for a server this is definitely a way to do it. Once you're up and running, I can't say that there is some groundbreaking improvement on operations though. Its better... just not zomfg-I-have-to-spend-money-on-these! better.

I would use a SSD for a high performance DB and really not much else. SSDs are MUCH faster but have a much more limited lifetime on read/write/

Interesting read on how SSD failures can cripple you
http://devblog.seomoz.org/2012/05/ssd-drive-failures/