SSD for production database I am looking for a solution to [dramatically] improve an enterprise database performance on a system that needs to support thousands of transactions (inserts &amp; large selects) per second. Besides the database/queries optimization, we are also looking for hardware improvements, too.

I need someone with experience in database administration that used SSD drives to store databases. What RAID configuration did you use? RAID1 looks like a good choice maybe combined with another redundancy-focused configuration, also SLC technology would be preferred for SSD drives I suppose.

The questions are: what type of SSD drives are you using (make, model)? How are they organized in RAIDs, what improvements did you achieve and how many (major) issues did you encounter? How much are you worried about the reliability of current SSD drives? Would you recommend using them for database (meaning critical) storage?

Also, what was the approximative price (at the time you implemented the solution, of course) of the implemented solution?

Maybe this post can also provide hystorical data about how SSD+database relationship has evolved over the time.

PS: If important, we are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2. Database size: over 400GB at this time, but my question is not only related to my specifics.

Thanks.

An interesting article found here: http://www.remote-dba.net/t_in_memory_cohesion_ssd.htm
Start by watching Brent Ozar's  introduction into the subject SQL on SSDs: Hot and Crazy Love. Follow up with the extensive and exhaustive benchmarking series from Paul Randal: Benchmarking: Introducing SSDs (Part 1: not overloaded log file array). There are many details, depending on workload type, dat vs. log, placement of tempdb etc etc etc.