SSD's into HP DL380 G6 - Sanity check please :)

[superatticman]

Dear All

 

Are thinking of using one of our older DL380 G6 servers to host Arcserv UDP. It has plenty of CPU and RAM capacity and is up to the task in many ways. However, for it to process the raw data more effectively we've been advised to use SSD's instead of the usual SAS 10k drives. I realise that HP will sell me SSD drives for a rather large amount of money However, would a decent consumer Intel or Kingston SSD drive prove to be reliable?? Not sure whether we are looking at RAID 1+0 or 5 or 6 just yet.

 

Or am I better off just paying the extra and getting in proper enterprise grade kit?

 

Cheers

[3s-gtech]

You need to look at how critical the service is. We have consumer (but high end) SSDs in a couple of servers, one for a RDP VM and one for a VM computing platform. Both have been running without issue for over a year, with expected performance boost. If you can afford to gamble with the server (role isn't 100% uptime critical, rebuild is quick, backups are quick to restore, redundancy etc etc) then go for it with cheaper drives. If it's a critical, absolutely no downtime-type role, I'd use enterprise storage. Probably no more reliable, but you can at least CYA when you explain why it has failed. Edited March 28, 2017 by 3s-gtech

[XiJ]

I'm sure I read a report somewhere (El Reg?) that 'business' ssd's have very little over 'consumer' class in speed and reliability.

 

But as above. If you have backups, perhaps redundancy and it's not mission critical then go for it.

[Arthur]

The main reasons to go for enterprise SSDs seem to be the higher endurance (more drives writes per day), guaranteed write performance and power loss protection.

 

Something to be aware of with Intel's consumer SSDs is that they will brick themselves when their NAND write limit is reached and the power is cycled. Their enterprise SSDs don't do this.

 

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

 

Few expected a TLC SSD to last that long—and fewer still would have bet on it outlasting two MLC-based drives. Intel's 335 Series failed much earlier, though to be fair, it pulled the trigger itself. The drive's media wear indicator ran out shortly after 700TB, signaling that the NAND's write tolerance had been exceeded. Intel doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled. Despite suffering just one reallocated sector, our sample dutifully followed the script. Data was accessible until a reboot prompted the drive to swallow its virtual cyanide pill.

[PR-UK]

This was a good report about using consumer SSDs in servers - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2016/11/18/dont-do-it-consumer-ssd/

[Norphy]

It's also not unheard of for tier 1 vendors like Dell and HP to restrict you from running anything but approved drives in their servers too. Make sure that your server can run third party drives before you splash out on any new disk.