jbailey Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Hello, Just wanted to try and get some feedback from anyone who is using\testing\playing with SSD drives in older servers. We have 2 x HP DL180 G6 servers with 8 x 15k SAS Drives we currently run Terminal Server VMS on for thin clients to access. Performance currently from the 15k sas drives on a Smart Array p410 with raid 50 is okay. Servers are out of warranty, was looking at replacing with new HP servers with SSD - but we are struggling to get a yes on the cost for this... I started looking at the possibility of adding ssd drives to them, thinking if we eventually ditched the servers in a year or so I could re-use the drives in a new server anyway. HP SSD drive prices made me weep, so started looking at other enterprise ssd drives, and it all seems rather grey on what may or may not work - and a expensive mistake to get it wrong. We don't need massive amounts of space, 8 x 200\300gb ish drives raided up on each server would be fine, new controllers if required. Has anyone done anything like this, is it worth the effort or should I just save myself a lot of grief and wait till I can replace them? Thanks in advance.
3s-gtech Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Intel S3700 is a good match for this. The SAS controller should support SATA so no issues there. Likely you'll lose some AHCI features and TRIM may not work, but these drives have good garbage collection built in and writes should be low in that use. Go for it - if it doesn't work out, they can be used elsewhere.
johnat1121 Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Ive got a DL180 G6 with a P800 controller and I can definitely say with experience, avoid OCZ where ever possible 4 failures within a month and its proving vdi for only 2 people
PotNoodleTech Posted January 23, 2014 Posted January 23, 2014 Gen 6 with the P410 is fine on SSDs. Hp reccomend always running Write cache with battery backup on the raid controller. Personally, unless your rolling in it, I'd use non enterprise SSDs. In a server that old surely it's not worth spending 1k extra on enterprise drives?
Chris_ Posted January 23, 2014 Posted January 23, 2014 We're using a couple of Samsung 840 SSDs in an old RM (Intel based) server with a LSI SAS/SATA RAID card. It's running an RDS VM for a few thin clients. Not had any problems with it in the few months it's been running. Might look to use the Samsung 840 Pro drives if we do this again.
chazzy2501 Posted January 23, 2014 Posted January 23, 2014 Asus RAIDR Express 240GB SSD (PCI Express 2.0 x2) [90MB0G60-M0EAY0] No enterprise class but then you're using un warrantied servers (BIOS support, superfast and not too expensive)
xenonive Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 I've got some Samsung 840 pro's running in my gen 7 server 512gb in raid 10 with no issues at moment. Got some improvement with firmware updates so with making sure all BIOS and firmwares are up to date. HP SmartDVD works well if never been done. Select a product - HP Support Center
zag Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 (edited) Hello, Just wanted to try and get some feedback from anyone who is using\testing\playing with SSD drives in older servers. We have 2 x HP DL180 G6 servers with 8 x 15k SAS Drives we currently run Terminal Server VMS on for thin clients to access. Performance currently from the 15k sas drives on a Smart Array p410 with raid 50 is okay. Servers are out of warranty, was looking at replacing with new HP servers with SSD - but we are struggling to get a yes on the cost for this... I started looking at the possibility of adding ssd drives to them, thinking if we eventually ditched the servers in a year or so I could re-use the drives in a new server anyway. HP SSD drive prices made me weep, so started looking at other enterprise ssd drives, and it all seems rather grey on what may or may not work - and a expensive mistake to get it wrong. We don't need massive amounts of space, 8 x 200\300gb ish drives raided up on each server would be fine, new controllers if required. Has anyone done anything like this, is it worth the effort or should I just save myself a lot of grief and wait till I can replace them? Thanks in advance. Yes I've done this with all our servers. Forget about "enterprise" SSD drives and look at what they use inside the models. We use Intel 330 600GB or 300GB in all our servers and they have been rock solid. I wouldn't trust any other manufacturer to be honest. Don't be fooled by the SLC vs. MLC debate, it has nothing to do with it as both types should last 20+ years. Its all about the reliability of the manufacturer and the other components they use. Edited January 24, 2014 by zag
zag Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 To all those people using Samsung 840 SSDs beware, they are using TLC memory in their new devices which is unproven over time. Just a warning... We have the 1tb versions on our backup server but I have not tested these over time. The intels i've been using for 3 years and no problems.
xenonive Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 Thanks for the warning , hopefully everyone using SSD has good DR\backup plan so if you can recover quickly if the worst is to happen.
Arthur Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 (edited) To all those people using Samsung 840 SSDs beware, they are using TLC memory in their new devices which is unproven over time. Have you seen this? The SSD Endurance Experiment: 500TB update « Tech Report Samsung's 840 (Non-Pro) SSDs shouldn't really be used in servers anyway. Edited January 24, 2014 by Arthur
zag Posted January 26, 2014 Posted January 26, 2014 Thanks for the warning , hopefully everyone using SSD has good DR\backup plan so if you can recover quickly if the worst is to happen. From my experience, they are far more reliable than hard disk drives. Hugely so. We use Veeam here so it should be pretty good Disaster recovery plan. Another advantage of using SSDs is I can backup all my servers in 20mins and restore one in under 5 mins! I love the future
zag Posted January 26, 2014 Posted January 26, 2014 Have you seen this? The SSD Endurance Experiment: 500TB update « Tech Report Samsung's 840 (Non-Pro) SSDs shouldn't really be used in servers anyway. Very interesting! I love this bit Although the 840 Series is clearly in worse shape than the competition, these results need to be put into context. 500TB works out to 140GB of writes per day for 10 years. That's an insane amount even for power users, and it far exceeds the endurance specifications of our candidates. The HyperX 3K, which has the most generous endurance rating of the bunch, is guaranteed for 192TB of writes.
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