Peter, I use a much cheaper (and faster) alternative: RAM Drive.
We have bumped up the RAM on my laptop to 16Gb and I downloaded a free RAMDrive utility that uses RAM to simulate a HDD. I then placed the ARSystem DB files of my ITSM764 VM on the RAMDrive. In spite of the fact that my laptop has 2 RAID-0 striped disks, Remedy now starts up 30% faster and rebuilding all the indexes on this ARSystem DB is approximately 6x faster (just over 1 minute). Allocating 8.5 GB RAM to the VM then makes for a ITSM 7.6.4 VM on your laptop that actually has acceptable performance. Be warned, however, there is a trade-off for the extra performance: The RAM Drive can get corrupted if your laptop is powered down unexpectedly. You need to ensure that you always shut down the VM and then the host to make sure your data is saved correctly to the image of the RAMDrive on your HDD. I also recommend using a partition with 64K file allocation blocks to store the RAMDrive image on your HDD to make sure laptop start-up/shut-down times are minimised. Best Regards, Theo Sent from my Black/Silver Personal Computer .... "Try not to become a person of success, but a person of value." - Albert Einstein From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Rick Cook Sent: 16 March 2012 23:26 To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Solid State Hard Drives ** Modern versions are better, but you can still get corrupted sectors on SSDs. I wouldn't use one as my only disk, but as part of a SAN, if you can afford it, no problem. Rick On Mar 16, 2012 5:17 PM, "Peter Romain" <p.romain.arsl...@parsolutions.co.uk<mailto:p.romain.arsl...@parsolutions.co.uk>> wrote: I'd try the SSD if I was you. Cloning and replacing the hard drive in the laptop is a breeze. Paying for the SSD is painful though - ~ £460 for a 500G version here in the UK -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>] On Behalf Of Murnane, Phil Sent: 16 March 2012 13:30 To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> Subject: Re: Solid State Hard Drives Peter: I have a habit of keeping a resource monitor (Windows 7 Resource Monitor or CentOS GNOME widget) running on my laptop at all times and of never using the host OS to do anything except run VMs. Given sufficient RAM (8GB seems adequate), I've found that the hard disk is almost always the bottleneck in performance, especially when running more than one VM. I've been considering buying an external esata enclosure with two 7200 RPM drives configured as RAID 0 for my work laptop. I use a similar storage configuration on my home server, and the disk bottleneck is much reduced. All that being said, SSDs have seemed pretty stable for the last couple of years. If performance similar to the RAID 0 configuration can be achieved internally, then it would be _way_ more convenient than an external enclosure. HTH, --Phil -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>] On Behalf Of Peter Romain Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 07:49 To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> Subject: Solid State Hard Drives Hi All, I couldn't get ITSM to run on my laptop which has an i7 processor and 8G RAM. I recently upgraded it to 16G and replaced the hard drive with a 500GB SSD. Now ITSM flies and I can run it and ADDM together in VM's and still do the normal document/email stuff. Are SSD's now sufficiently stable to use in datacenter servers? If so, would this help solve some performance issues? I'm not responsible for any servers so am just asking out of interest. Cheers Peter _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org<http://www.arslist.org> attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com<http://www.wwrug12.com> ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org<http://www.arslist.org> attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com<http://www.wwrug12.com> ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org<http://www.arslist.org> attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com<http://www.wwrug12.com> ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _attend WWRUG12 www.wwrug.com<http://www.wwrug.com> ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"