i was planning to buy a SAS system made of two 15k RPM disks in Raid 0 configuration to give a boost to my s.o. and my apps... but after i saw that article on Coding Horror, i've started to thinking if a new 2nd generation SSD could do the same job, or even better...
Does anybody have any information to help me decide?
RAID-0 is a pretty bad idea, as one of the drives crashing will mean lost data. The only good SSDs as of this post when it comes to price and performance are Intel X25-M(step above very good 15000RPM drives) and X25-E(phenomenal I/O).
See e.g. page 6 and page 8 of the Anandtech article The SSD Improv: Intel & Indilinx get TRIM, Kingston Brings Intel Down to $115 (released today) to see how the latest SSDs revisions (with firmwares supporting the TRIM command) smash one of the fastest hdisks (Western Digitals VelociRaptor) in seek-intensive workloads.
A good primer for SSDs is to read this anandtech article.
For regular desktop use (gaming, office, productivity, what have you) SSD will kick 15krpm SAS drives around easily, since there's a lot of random reads and writes involved. You do have to be careful in choosing the correct SSD though, choosing one of the older models won't give you that much of a performance difference.
If, on the other hand, you're doing a lot of sequential read/write, like for instance editing videos and working with large data sets (moving large VM images around, etc), the SAS drives will be very fast. On the other hand, the SAS drives are just as fast at it as fast SATA 7200rpm drives.
So, it all depends on what your use case is. If you're planning for normal desktop use, SSD is the way to go. For big chunks of sequential r/w you'll be better off with a pair of spinning drives.
For your use, which sounds like high IO, the SSD is going to provide much better performance.
Not to mention SSD has a much better mean time to fail, and RAID0 doubles your risk of failure.
"RAID-0 is a pretty bad idea, as one of the drives crashing will mean lost data."
Honestly, as many times as I hear that, I still think that's rediculous. Think about it: If you only had 1 drive by itself, and that drive failed, you'll loose ALL your data too! Having 2 drives RAID0 only gives you a marginal gain in risk of failure.
If it's important, then backup your data, regardless if you have 1 drive or 2 drive RAID0.
What's your budget? If you can afford the SSD drives and specs show that they will push the data faster than the specs on your traditional disks, go for it. RAID 0 will definitely be cheaper though.
If you had tons of cash for the project get SSD's to create a RAID mirror and see how that works. If anything you could have great info to get posted to a blog for others who wish they had the budget to do it :-)
Also, measure your needs. If you have something that's lightning fast but the people using it are hardly pushing performance limits, is it worth the money and time spent? Or are you overengineering it?
