Intel SSD x25-Extreme vs. OCZ Vertex 2 SATATII

I really do appreciate all the input. I am kind of stuck now going with what I have already ordered, but it looks like in the worst case I will have overkill which doesn’t bother me that much. I really don’t want to have to touch this system for a very long time.

As for my decision to go ahead with the SSD’s, I am not exactly sure what to come away with from the forum, whether or not they do use less power or not, but if my own experience with them is accurate then they do use less power.

My old development machine had 2 of the ATI 3870’s, 4GB ram, and 6 150 GB (RAID 0) raptors in it. I was having problems keeping it up and running with a 750 Watt Power supply, and I went to a 1000 Watt to solve the problem. It was also very hot and the fans ran fast to keep it cool. My latest development machine, in exactly the same case with the same fans has 6GB Ram, 3 ATI 5870’s, and 4 of the OCZ vertex 60GB SSD’s. I was so anxious to get it up and running that I grabbed an old 550 Watt power supply and stuck it in my machine. It has been running for 6 months flawlessly. Of course I am using less drives (4 vs. 6), but I am also using more memory and 3 graphics cards instead of 2. I haven’t gone about it as scientific as I probably could have, but I can barely even hear my machine with the SSD’s running, and unless there was something wrong with my 750 Watt powers supply (it was either a corsair or OCZ) it is definitely using less power. Of course the SSD’s make no noise, but the fans to cool down the case are barely spinning now. I did not have the latest raptors (veliraptor’s) but understand them to be much more efficient.

As for going with Microsoft (instead of Lamp), this particular Web App is for financial services and most financial IT shops still want to see Microsoft products, Microsoft SQL Server instead of MySQL and Windows Operating Systems. It is naive of them, but marketing by Microsoft pays off. I have several Web App's running on Linux, and they run flawlessly. I even run our asterisk based phone system off of Lamp, and I just looked and it and the uptime has been 4 years. I think that is pretty incredible.

As for this particular Web App, the files can be large, and so I wanted to make sure that my hardware did not become the bottleneck in performance.

I did choose the OCZ vertex 2 SSD's over the Intel SSD's. Just couldn't justify the difference in price to go with the Intel’s though they are probably better. I worked at Intel 25 years ago (an EE) and actually remember touching on this technology anticipating it to be where it is today sometime. It would surprise me greatly that any company has as much background and knowledge about SSD’s as Intel does, but again I chose OCZ to save money. I will probably run them in a RAID 5 as I grow the system over time, but chose just to mirror one drive onto the other for each of my Virtual machines for now.

I had 4 of the original OCZ Vertex 60 GB (RAID 0) in my development machine, and they were lightning fast with reads (max 568.7MB/s, avg 388.89MB/s, random access time 50 MICRO seconds... according to Sandra), but slow in writing. So I am putting two of them in the U2 Server, and 2 of them in my 5 year old Quasmio Laptop. For the server, I will have one mirrored onto the other for VM1, with Windows Web Server 2008 R2 and the Web Apps on it. I am doing that because I expect in the end to have the Web App loaded in Ram and the session state on a different Virtual Machine so there should be very little writing to the SSD.

I have purchased 2 OCZ Vertex 2 drives for VM2, with fast reads/writes, and will have one mirrored onto the other. It will have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 and SQL Server 2008 Web R2 (one processor license) and it will be where I store the Session State as well.

I expect to have both VM’s using different Raid’s for performance. Hopefully this will all work well.

Thanks for all the input. As I get the system up and running, I will probably be back with some more questions!