SSD for Filemaker Server?

March 23, 200917 yr

I have recently discovered the joy of SSDs and added them to some of my machines, mainly my laptop and a new Mac Mini which now fairly screams for the tasks I need it for. Quite good. Now I'm thinking that hosting my database off a fast SSD with good seek times (the Intel one seems best) is probably going to be a good idea.

I'd love to hear input from Filemaker users about this -- has it been done, did the seek time and fast reading make calculations or other data run more quickly? I believe we're doing nothing but reading of data and very little writing, so I'm hopeful that an SSD could improve things nicely. The slowest operations seem to be calculating a sum, for example seeing how many of a certain product are left in stock if there are a lot of records to count, and running reports that need to write records out to a file. We don't have a high amount of load, maybe 10 people doing searches on products most of the time.

Also, in general, which is more important to overall speed, the speed of the server or speed of the client machine? (Why I am asking when I know the answer will be 'it depends' I'm currently running server 9 Adanced using a G5 2.5 ghz quad-core, and when I look at the processor activity it's always almost nil on all four cores. Can anyone tell me how good Filemaker Server is about using multiple cores?

Thanks for any comments you have. I am looking forward to the era of SSD database hosting.

March 30, 200917 yr

Well done for posting on this Peter, I'm just looking into it because of reported speed problems re: FMS10 'hot' backups and I've found issues such as longevity if high number of writes are going on - so we probably want an SLC as opposed to an MLC based SSD. Which means Samsung or the very very fine looking Intel X25-E - ideal for DB serving - like having an insanely fast RAID, but just 32GB and only occupying one SATA 2 bay...

It's the wear-leveling stuff that importantly assure longevity of drive...

I'd be interested to know the I/Os per second on a busy FileMaker Server too (running at 1000 8k IOPS, Robin Harris reckons a drive like the Intel one - with good wear-leveling ratio - could run for 12 years or so).

Interested to know what people think. Could well be a solution to any slow backups/lock out time reductions. Would surely resolve many speed issues on db - the zero seek time has got to be good. Apparently a real forte of SSD is the reindexing of databases... all those reports summing tens of thousands of records etc, seek time must drag them down... Maybe!!??

Cheers,

t