Yes. By 25%, in the test described below.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) with no moving parts are now beginning to show up in high-end workstations and rack-mounted servers.
I recently got access to a Dell Precision T7500 workstation with four SATA (Serial ATA) disk drives, two of them SSDs and two of them traditional mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) with multiple read/write heads and platters that spin at 7,200 RPM.
For the record, the workstation had 12 GB of RAM and two quad-core Intel Xeon X5677 3.5 GHz CPUs. Java heap size for JBoss was set to 5 GB. The SSDs were MZ5PA256 from Samsung (256 GB, 3.0 Gbps SATA). The HDDs were WD3200AAKS Caviar Blue from Western Digital (320 GB, 3.0 Gbps SATA 7200 RPM).
I cloned a LiveCycle ES2.5/JBossAS 4.2.1/Oracle 11g environment (with all three Solution Accelerators as well as Content Services) to the SSD and the HDD and tested them separately. I adopted the Anandtech approach – conduct 3 tests, and take the median to report results. Oracle was on a separate server.
JBoss startup on the HDD was 4 minutes and 1 second (241 seconds). On the SSD, this was 3 minutes and 2 seconds (182 seconds). That is 59 seconds (25%) better.
JBoss startup times are usually good indicators of the system’s storage capabilities. If your JBoss startup time is more than 5 minutes, you should take a critical look at your hardware.
Here is a Tom’s Hardware review of SSDs in RAID configurations.
The answer should be “It depends”. It depends on the speed of the drives you are replacing and the speed of the SSDs you are replacing them with.
In a typical server environment, you might be using 10,000 RPM or even 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, which are significantly more performant than 7200 RPM desktop SATA drives.
Indeed.
RT @Johnny_Geez on Twitter:
“Windows 2k8 VM 4GB RAM with same (ES2/3 SA/Content services) went from 13min on 7200 rpm hdd to 4:30~5 on SSD. Very happy!!”
So it seems @Johnny_Geez got a 61% improvement.
Maybe it’s OT, but in a certain way it is related…
At the moment, I’m developing with LiveCycle ES2 using a VMWare image on a MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM and 7200 RPM HD.
I wonder if I can also use a MacBook Air 13″ with SSD, which at max can have 4 GB of RAM. Do you think it is possible to set a development environment which is usable on such a system?
If the machine itself only has 4 GB of RAM, a VM running on it will have to do with less, possibly 3 GB. So it is possible, as long as you don’t deploy BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and Content Services (which in effect also means no Solution Accelerators).