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At an IBM pre-POWER7 release meeting Larry and I asked the question about the SSD degradation. The answer was simple, we (IBM) engineered it with sufficient overcapacity that the lifespan of the drive will equal that of a physical drive. They also have sufficient performance testing to be confident in the stated performance of the RAID arrays as long as they are built as recommended.
While I think it is too early to tell if the SSDs are in fact living up the the high praise they are getting, it is also a bit early to start worrying about the ill effects of the technology. It is true that SSDs are considerably higher in cost per storage unit than traditional DASD, but then years ago when I (and many others on the list as well) started in IT, mass storage was Tape, only transactional data that was less than several months old was kept on actual DASD storage. Mechanical DASD is now the new tape, relatively cheap, easy to manage, and reliable. Makes you wonder what's next.

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects -- LLC



David Gibbs wrote:
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I recently saw this on Slashdot ... and since IBM i supports both RAID and SSD's, I thought it might be interesting ...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/03/06/1650232/Wear-Leveling-RAID-Can-Wipe-Out-SSD-Advantage

This article discusses using solid state disks in enterprise storage networks. A couple of problems noted by the author: wear leveling can eat up most of a drive's bandwidth and make write performance no faster than a hard drive, and using SSDs with RAID controllers brings up its own set of problems. 'Even the highest-performance RAID controllers today cannot support the IOPS of just three of the fastest SSDs. I am not talking about a disk tray; I am talking about the whole RAID controller. If you want full performance of expensive SSDs, you need to take your $50,000 or $100,000 RAID controller and not overpopulate it with too many drives. In fact, most vendors today have between 16 and 60 drives in a disk tray and you cannot even populate a whole tray. Add to this that some RAID vendor's disk trays are only designed for the performance of disk drives and you might find that you need a disk tray per SSD drive at a huge cost.'


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