'Cheap' SSD for Virtualisation Lab

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Gav, Mar 30, 2013.

  1. Gav

    Gav Kilobyte Poster

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    eBuyer are currently running an offer on 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs. If you use the offer code '512M4' and this link, you can pick one up for £264.99.

    This obviously isn't cheap storage, but I've used an SSD in the past for running VMs and the performance is very impressive. If you're building a new virtualisation lab, you might want to consider one of these instead of a RAID10 array of spinning disks. The power saving may even make up the difference in price.

    ...or you could just buy one to say you have half a terabyte of solid state storage :D

    - Gav
     
  2. Shinigami

    Shinigami Megabyte Poster

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    I'd say for a home lab, an SSD for virtualization purposes is almost a must. If you can run dynamically expanding VHD's for example with Hyper-V, you should be able to fit up to 20 machines for various testing purposes and you can perform a number of small disk IO activities without there being a noticeable impact on the other machines (e.g. starting over half a dozen machines at the same time, or updating multiple machines with the latest patches and so on).

    It used to be agony doing this on my laptops 7.2k rpm disk but the SSD has saved me a lot of time and effort.
     
    Certifications: MCSE, MCITP, MCDST, MOS, CIW, Comptia
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  3. dales

    dales Terabyte Poster

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    Agreed, SSD definitely a must these days, I've managed to aquire a few of them for my lab, labbing even on sata3 disks becomes painful very quickly.
     
    Certifications: vExpert 2014+2015+2016,VCP-DT,CCE-V, CCE-AD, CCP-AD, CCEE, CCAA XenApp, CCA Netscaler, XenApp 6.5, XenDesktop 5 & Xenserver 6,VCP3+5,VTSP,MCSA MCDST MCP A+ ITIL F
    WIP: Nothing
  4. GSteer

    GSteer Megabyte Poster

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    Agreed a third. It's the way to go. I just need to upgrade my 80GB as it's bursting it's seams acting as my pagefile, VMs drive and photoshop/lightroom cache/scratch drive.
     
    Certifications: BSc. (Comp. Sci.), MBCS, MCP [70-290], Specialist [74-324], Security+, Network+, A+, Tea Lord: Beverage Brewmaster | Courses: LFS101x Introduction to Linux (edX)
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