Machiel,
There is quite a bit of information available on the net on the use of solid state within databases in general as well as specific to PostgreSQL. It is worth reading about it in full (I recommend
https://www.packtpub.com/postgresql-9-0-high-performance/book for some good information on it). In summary though you need to spend a lot of money on solid state drives in order for them to be safe for databases due to write back cache - the more expensive ones will have battery backup cache to protect your WAL in the event of a power cut. Write through cache isn't generally viable for solid state due to the way the technology works. It usually isn't cost effective to use solid state compared to getting good SAS disks.
I can't really comment much on using PostgreSQL on Windows other than to say that PostgreSQL defers a lot of its functionality onto the OS such as backups, WAL archving and to a certain extent block caching. Therefore a good OS is more important than on other databases and I imagine that using Linux would make the life of the DBA much happier.
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View my Linkedin profileOn Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:26 AM, Machiel Richards
<machielr@rdc.co.za> wrote:
Secondly, is it viable or worth it to look at Solid State drive as storage method instead of 15k sas disks for instance? What is the performance difference in this regard.