Instead of the usual SSD, you may want to consider the 'ioDrive' products from "Fusion-io".
http://www.fusionio.com/
This company makes enterprise-class storage on a board populated with flash and managed by their own
supposedly-sophisticateddrivers. The board + drivers are meant to get around the problems of SSDs, such as
write-failures.They make both SLC and MLC products, at different sizes, to meet different budgets and purposes.
I tried them about 3 years ago on a database server (not Postgres). The real-world speed was excellent, yet
disappointingin that it performed as well as our high-end RAID-10 from HP. We were looking for even more speed, and
werepromised that, but did not see it in our trials.
Caveats:
• This was using their first attempt at Windows drivers.
• We may not have tuned the settings properly.
In the end, we chose to keep our RAID for the time being.
So, while I can't specifically recommend their products, I certainly suggest considering them. They have drivers for
Linuxand Windows, but apparently their rumored Mac OS X drivers never came to fruition.
Other benefits beyond speed include size, power, and heat. An internal board with flash saves on all three, compared to
aRAID made of either discs or SSDs.
--Basil Bourque
