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Has anyone here tried using the Momentus XT Hybrid disks in a real server as balance between performance and cost? What were the results?

I've heard desktop-focused reviews on both sides: a few cases where it made dramatic improvements, and a few where it didn't help at all. Those who reported improvements generally said it took a bit to reach that level, as the drive learns what needs to go in the SSD area over time. That would also explain some of the negative reviews: a "journalist" who only a spent a day with a drive before writing it up. Work-load on the drive could be another big factor, depending on what your I/O behavior is like; a server might put a very different kind of load on the disks than a desktop. Thus I'm hoping to find someone with real-world results from a server with a few of these disks working in a RAID volume.

Joel Coel
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Not in a server but all of the reviews I've seen were pretty damning of any supposed performance gains they have even in a desktop setup.

Chopper3
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  • – Joel Coel Apr 29 '11 at 17:57
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    We've got one of the hybrid drives in a laptop here. It is quicker booting than a standard disk drive, but that's where the benefits stop. We'll keep using them for people who need a ton of storage in their laptop, but everyone else is getting SSDs. @Joel, I wouldn't use either in a server yet; especially the non-enterprise ones, they don't have much reserve for bad sectors. – Chris S Apr 29 '11 at 18:01
  • @Chris - that point about bad sector space is worth mentioning in an answer. You post it, I'll accept it. – Joel Coel Apr 30 '11 at 03:28
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I wouldn't use either SSDs or Hybrids in a server yet; especially the non-enterprise ones, they don't have much reserve for bad sectors. With a server's W/R workload the drives are likely to fail much sooner than you'd except.

Chris S
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With only 4GB of SSD cache, and that SSD cache only being used for reads, I would not expect them to help server workloads. If you have 4GB of hot files, they should already be cached in your servers RAM, making the Momentus's SSD cache pointless.

sciurus
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Another way of approaching this would be to get a larger cache for your disk controller, or just faster disks - going from 7.2 to 10, or 15K is a proven method. Going from 3.5 (LFF) to 2.5 (SFF) disks also helps.

Snellgrove
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