Well that is disappointing and arguably more important for many people. Not to be a debbie downer or anything.
When you're looking at around $8/GB for storage of this type, it's no surprise that Linode didn't bother.
Surprisingly, HP is offering the drives with 3-year warranties, which is a far cry from sometime ago where they were something like a few months.
It might not be a profit center on its own, but it could land them customers who otherwise would have to skip them.
I would take this further and argue that consumer grade SSD's shouldn't be discarded out of hand either for similar reasons.
[1] http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product/sku/10238268/mfg_partno/VM...
The fact is, if you care about IOPS, SSDs are cheaper than spinning disks. In other words, you need to stripe out across way more spindles (and thus consume a lot of power) to get the IOPS you get from a decent SSD.
Even an expensive SSD is _cheaper_ than a HD on an IOPs to IOPs comparison, and IOPs is what matters to most people.
They have startup program: http://www.saphana.com/community/learn/startups
It also costs an absolute fortune (only approved hardware allowed) and even the AWS instance which costs $3.50/hour is not certified for production deployments. I don't know many startups who can afford $5000 a month for minimum redundancy.
To get what I want from my database, I want SSDs. If I move my database to another provider, then I have to move everything else to keep the latency to the database low.
Not having an SSD option even when it's expensive leaves me shopping around for where to move all of my Linodes.
You might try building a new server on Digital Ocean with VirtIO enabled. It's an experimental option for new servers and you can contact support to have it enabled on existing ones, but should show further improvements according to some other folks in the support community.
> We’ve also moved to the latest generation of the enterprise-grade hard disk drives — doubling their cache, increasing their port speed, and decreasing latency and access time
It would be nice to have SSD as an (expensive) option for those that can absorb the cost.
> "we instead decided to go with mainstream SSDs to lower the risk of a random mechanical failure. We didn't need the endurance of an enterprise drive in these machines since they weren't being written to all that frequently, but we needed reliable drives. Although quite old by today's standards, we settled on 160GB Intel X25-M G2s but partitioned the drives down to 120GB in order to ensure they'd have a very long lifespan." (http://anandtech.com/show/6824/inside-anandtech-2013-allssd-...)
In the comments, Anand mentions that he went with the X25-M since the upgrade was last year; if he were doing it now, it would be the Intel 710 or S3700. Also worth noting that reliability, not speed, was their primary motivator.
I wonder if there's a way that Linode could open up that as an option to subscribers? The disks have a shorter lifespan with high writes, but that's measurable, and could be worked into the cost.
MLC (Multi-Level Cell) SSDs are slightly slower, a lot cheaper, and less reliable than SLC (Single Level Cell) SSDs.
Fundamentally, an MLC stores more data in each cell (hence the Multi), while an SLC stores 1 bit of data in each cell.
There's now all sorts of "eMLC" drives which are pushing the reliability of MLC up towards the SLC levels, but they're not very common yet.
Would be even happier with more / cheaper memory.
also perhaps a more elastic storage option to stretch/shrink your linode disks, take snapshots (not assigned to a given linode) would be great.