Industry issue replacing drives years later

[JoeAtWork]

Hi All,

Thinking out loud...

A few years ago we made a SSD FreeNAS/TrueNAS server with Samsung DTC 860 drives that were 4tb. Now when I go look for those they seem to have disappeared. How do we replace or expand capacity when these COTS products get revised, updated and replaced?

Thanks,
Joe

 

[jgreco]

You just look for the current version of them, praying that they exist.

I just turned in a perfectly good small AMD Sempron PC to the recycling center because with PATA and 2GB RAM max, there wasn't anywhere good to go with it. Tech does have a finite lifespan.

Back in ~2010 we were using consumer-grade Sandforce 60G, 120G, and 240G 2.5" SATA SSD's in hypervisors for a cheap/fast tier of storage. By 2015, we were using Intel 535 480G's, and then Samsung 840/850's. We can still use 860/870's in those. That's 12 years of upgrades through the 2.5" bays.

On the flip side, there's the example of the SATA M.2's. We retrofitted a bunch of systems to be able to take 2TB SATA gumstick 860 Evo's, only to have Samsung thumb their nose at the format for the 870's. For awhile, the 2TB 860's were totally unavailable, though they recently resurfaced. But WD stepped in with both Blue and Red variants on that.

I think the answer is that you just kinda need to be proactively looking at parts availability, and planning for what to do as it changes.

 

[JoeAtWork]

so 1/2 of my shelf was loaded, so if I use mirrors and fill all 24 slots I would have the benefit of 1/2 the drives having fresh blocks for wear leveling and I would get to double my capacity. If the first set of drives wear out I have lost redundancy but not the whole zpool.

For sata/sas with PLP there really has not been a lot of advancements in the enterprise space.

 

[jgreco]

For sata/sas with PLP there really has not been a lot of advancements in the enterprise space.

Well, no, there hasn't been. Basically there was a point where SATA hit the approximately-6Gbps mark, the SATA-IO (the industry org) couldn't be arsed to figure out how to make it go faster, and NVMe became more attractive for the ability to go to multiples-faster rather than to just the next presumed SATA tier of 12Gbps. SAS has made that jump, but primarily for SAS expanders and disk shelf capabilities. While there are lots of both HDD and SSD's capable of 12Gbps, the demand just isn't there. 24Gbps SAS (and a few SSD's) exist, but it really seems like a dead end technology except perhaps for disk shelf attachment.

SAS now sits between SATA 6Gbps and NVMe (PCIe3 and 4) as this weird niche product that isn't likely to see ginormous uptake, so the amount of advancements in the space is not that great. SATA SSD is now bulk storage, NVMe SSD is performance storage, the people who used to be excited about ~6Gbps SATA SSD's half a decade ago moved on to NVMe and then to Optane and even lands beyond. In 6Gbps-land, you're just going to see boring iterative products like the Samsung 850 Evo -> 860 -> 870. The occasional unicorn like the 8GB 870 QVO will still make a mild splash now and then (and reinforces that SATA SSD is headed for bulk storage). And SAS SSD ... well... uh I dunno. I can't see a serious mainstream use case.

There's still the stuff like the Nimbus 3.5" 100TB SSD, for the cost of a halfway decent car, or Samsung's 30TB PM1643a 2.5" drive for about $8K. Of the two, the Samy makes some sense if you wanted to load up a Supermicro SSG-2028R-NR48N with 50 of them and cram 1.5PB of storage into 2U. This seems like it makes 30PB in one rack an achievable goal... if you can afford $8 million.

I'm sorry if that's depressing or distressing, but I feel like it's the most honest answer to your question.

 

[JoeAtWork]

Jgreco,

It sounds like iXsystems might be preparing for scale out, so we don't have to worry about chassis expansion and just do node expansion for capacity. As long as we get some way to tier the storage so our hot blocks are distributed to the fastest nodes in the cluster.

Well I am sure COVID has messed us up too. The 3.5" drive market is messed up where we have some SATA, some SAS and the capacity at the top has shingles. NVME and faster SAS has a mess where even if you went SAS 12 or SAS 24 you might get nixed so that in 36 months they don't make those drives anymore.

Our old IBM Fiber channel maxes out at 2TB disks and they have not "made" a 2TB disk in a the last decade, so even with that we are really using New Old Stock if your lucky. :-(

SATA has been the only thing slightly consistent. but home users are getting tablets and laptops with gum sticks :-(

May be the future is to have usb 4 hard drives!

Thanks,
Joe