Solid State Drives in Servers

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Hello

We have a few sites where there is a fair amount of movement and vibration (fairly large commercial ships) which seems to be regularly killing the drives in the HP servers onboard. I'm looking into replacing them with Solid State Drives but we just don't have the budget for HP's SLC based SAS SSDs.

So, I'm for the OS drive I'm looking at using some 60GB MLC based SATA drives in either a 2 drive RAID mirror or a 4 drive RAID5+hotspare setup. Then I would have 4 x 500GB "standard mechanical" drives in a RAID5+hotspare setup to hold the file share data.

The thinking behind this is that the OS, programs and configuration (the time consuming stuff to restore/rebuild) is all held on the SSDs and the file shares (and maybe the pagefile) are stored on the higher capacity but more failure-prone drives because that data is easy to recover from backup. This also keeps the vast majority of the heavily read/writes away from the SSDs which will hopefully help extend their life a little.

These are fairly light use servers so I'm not too bothered about using supposedly slower SATA based drives, but the reliability of the SSDs worries me a little. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with using MLC SSDs in their servers, if they found them to be reliable, how the lifetime was, etc?

Dave