I have a RAID 10 array with four 1TB WD RE4 drives SATA II. The OS is installed on it and our accounting software (SAGE 50).
I was considering adding two 256GB SSD's in RAID 1 to store the data from SAGE 50.
Would the application benefit from the SSD speed where data is stored, given that the application installed on the slower RAID?
Note: The RAID 10 controller only supports 4 drives.
Are you experiencing any performance issue with your current RAID 10 setup? You will only see performance increase if your 2 x 256GB SSD are faster and configured correctly on high end of RAID card.
Also, try to choose correct SSD, MLC or SLC, based up on the performance you are getting with WD RE4 drives. Also, if you haven't enabled 'Write Cache' on your RAID controller, try to do so (if you have a BBU). That will increase the performance. Below link might be helpful to you:
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/MLC-vs-SLC-Which-flash-SSD-is-right-for-you
If you can post the exact specification of your server, I might be able to help further.
How much benefit (if any) you see depends on the workload and I/O profile.
You need to do an analysis and determine what makes sense.
If the application spends a lot of time reading its executables and libraries you want to put the application itself on the SSDs.
If the application spends a lot of time reading data files you want to put the data files on SSDs.
If the application spends a lot of time doing read/write I/O to its data files you want to determine of the SSD's write speed will be an issue (if the SSD write speed is as good or better than rotating disk you can see a performance benefit, but if you spend a lot of time writing data and the SSDs take longer to do that you may see a performance decrease)
Also note that if you're not saturating your disk's I/O bandwidth (hitting the disk's limits) SSDs may not give you a meaningful performance increase at all: You can read data faster than spinning disks can, but if you don't actually need that speed the performance improvement will be negligible.
Similarly if your disks are saturating your controller's bus SSDs won't help (the SSDs will also saturate the controller's bus, and you'll see identical performance) -- SSD or spinny disk your limit is still the controller.
I know this is an old thread but I thought I'd shed more light on it as I've been working on a conversion and spun up a VM on NVMe PCI-e storage (3500MB/s Read 2500MB/s writes) with CPU 8 cores and 8GB of RAM. It appears that the design of Sage 50 even 2019 edition is 32 bit and NOT 64 bit. As a database itself if you can never have more than 4GB of system memory then you are limited to how things could be tuned to run within memory. Even with these specs Sage is slower than you would expect. Sage was never designed for high performance, just enough performance and to be able to run on decade old hardware. Now will you experience a performance boost with your configuration? Yes, but probably not as much as you think. Relocating the application to the SSD's would help as well but you will only be as fast as your slowest moving part. For me, right now that's Sage being 32-bit and I have not found any documentation yet on optimizing block size of the partition but the question then becomes how many hours would you waste to gain a small percent of speed. I also notice that only a couple of the cores in my VM show much use from Sage so they probably haven't optimized to fully utilize all cores or the SQL queries behind the scenes are horribly inefficient for a given task. Now if network users are complaining but the performance is fine on the actual server then it's your network. Verify all adapters and switches are 1Gbps full duplex and troubleshoot from there. If over Wi-Fi, it could be interference related or unrealistic expectations for Wi-Fi throughput. Unnecessary data from poorly written SQL queries can also create this bottleneck as I've seen with other programs over the years, I just haven't had to troubleshoot this with Sage yet as my Wi-Fi users know it's not as fast as being hardwired.
