User blog comment:Wade Warren/How we deliver pages to you/@comment-168424-20120228000611/@comment-3475413-20120228010213

Thank you. I'm glad you see value in it. It did take me a while to reformat a 12 page technical white paper into a reasonable blog format.

We have a few SSDs still in service that are going on 2+ years at this point. Due to the growth of the service, we're constantly upgrading so we have little concern about SSD longevity and we've actually seen fewer failures on our SSDs than our spinning disks in the dev/test/archive environments. I attribute the improved reliability to the SSDs low power consumption and resulting reduction in ambient heat in the system.

If technology buyers in companies with high performance web services would actually do the math, they would realize that SSDs are actually very cheap compared to high-speed SAS drives when you use the right $/capacity equation.

$$/GB/IOps instead of limiting the conversation just to $$/GB which will favor "old" slow spinning disks every time. It will also make it so you need to horribly over-provision in order to get the performance out of the fastest available spinning disks that you can get out of just a few SSDs and the right configuration.