Solid State Drives (SSD)

We know you. You won’t settle for just reliable, just good, just quick backup. You need a solid plan in place. Which is why we offer Intel 80GB solid state drives as an add-on to most of our Business and Developer servers. Designed with almost no moving parts, these drives have a very low risk of mechanical failures. Take a look at all the SSD has to offer—we’re sure you won’t be disappointed. (And here’s a helpful link by Intel.)

Features

• Faster start-up, thanks to no spin-up
• Quick random access through a system with no read/write head
• Faster boot and application launch times with Low read latency times in applications where hard disk seeks are the limiting factor
• Consistent read performance with no reliance on physical location
• No problems due to file fragmentation
• Silent operation due to the lack of moving parts
• High mechanical reliability
• Almost negligible failures in writing/erasing data operations
• A number of tests have been run to determine the benefits of these drives*

*Below you can view graphs representing the data from these tests that show the benefits of solid state drives. (IOMeter is an open source [originally developed by Intel] tool that can measure I/O performance in almost any way you can imagine. You can test random or sequential accesses [or a combination of the two], read or write operations [or a combination of the two], in blocks from a few KB to several MB. Whatever the goal, IOMeter can generate a workload and measure how fast the I/O system performs. SQLIO is a tool provided by Microsoft that can determine the I/O capacity of a given disk subsystem. It should simulate somewhat how MS SQL 2000/2005 accesses the disk subsystem).