According to
this thread which was created to explain the downtime and data loss that Bitcointalk experienced earlier this year, Bitcointalk is hosted on solid-state drives (SSDs):
Technical details:
The bitcointalk.org and bitcoin.it databases were stored on a RAID 1+0 array: two RAID 1 arrays of 2 SSDs each, joined via RAID 0 (so 4 SSDs total, all the same model). We noticed yesterday that there were some minor file system errors on the bitcoin.it VM, but we took it for a fluke because there were no ongoing problems and the RAID controller reported no disk issues. A few hours later, the bitcointalk.org file system also started experiencing errors. When this was noticed, the bitcointalk.org database files were immediately moved elsewhere, but the RAID array deteriorated rapidly, and most of the database files ended up being too badly corrupted to be used. So a separate OS was set up on a different RAID array, and the database was restored using a daily backup.
My guess is that both of the SSDs in one of the RAID-1 sub-arrays started running out of spare sectors at around the same time. bitcoin.it runs on the same array, and it's been running low on memory for a few weeks, so its use of swap may have been what accelerated the deterioration of these SSDs. The RAID controller still reports no issues with the disks, but I don't see what else could cause this to happen to two distinct VMs. I guess the RAID controller doesn't know how to get the SMART data from these drives. (The drives are fairly old SSDs, so maybe they don't even support SMART.)
I'm curious as to why this is so. Don't SSDs have finite read-write cycles? I would think that it's not really a good idea to use SSDs to host a PHP application and a database that is constantly being written to. Even more so if the memory is low (and it was) since this forces the server to constantly write to the swap space.
I have an Asus Eee PC which uses an SSD for storage. Unlike the rest of their laptop range, the virtual memory was disabled on these netbooks to spare the SSD. Not sure if it's related but I've also heard that using a Raspberry Pi to run a full node is a bad idea since the write cycles would wear out the SD card very quickly.