{"id":271,"date":"2011-12-06T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T19:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/?p=271"},"modified":"2011-12-03T21:56:54","modified_gmt":"2011-12-04T04:56:54","slug":"ssds-as-a-cost-savings-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/2011\/12\/ssds-as-a-cost-savings-device\/","title":{"rendered":"SSDs as a Cost-Savings Device"},"content":{"rendered":"

TLDR: While SSDs have a higher up-front cost, they are a large cost-saver in the long run in high-use scenarios such as data centers.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you were building a large new datacenter, would you rather pay $0.10 per gigabyte for your storage, or $1.10? What if I told you that you should pay $1.10, and that it would save you almost 40% over 10 years? You would probably guess that I had flunked math (which luckily I only came close to doing in AB calculus), but there is a method behind the madness, and one that deserves a closer look.<\/p>\n

Here’s the scenario: you are a part of an organization that is gathering historical scans from all around the world and will be archiving them for posterity. The data needs to be stored in a lossless format, and will collectively amount to 1.4 petabytes of data per year. Also, the images will need to be made available on-demand to lucky users across the Internet. How will you go about designing an infrastructure to handle these needs?<\/em> This scenario is based on a real world implementation, and was given to us in an enterprise applications class with the instructions to create a feasible proposal for the project. While examining the various aspects of the project, we\u00a0found that using solid state drives would be a huge cost saver in regards to total cost of ownership over the course of 10 years.<\/p>\n

When storing large amounts of data, more than raw purchase price needs to be taken into account. Other important costs that must play in include factors such as:<\/p>\n