List of SSDs with Power Loss Protection

[HoneyBadger]

Nope, just had one kill my NUC actually. I mean, MAYBE that's Windows 10's fault, but having the drive come up as unrecognized boot media altogether? It re-imaged just fine. No SMART errors reported...

Pull the temperature stats and look at the peak recorded. Those drives can run toasty under load and will lock up entirely and become unrecognized.

 

[AntonyNguyen]

Hey Everyone,

I stumbled upon this thread while looking for PLP-enabled M.2 NVMe drives. It looks like Kingston now sells these and are aimed specifically for use as boot drives, but I'm sure they have more general use cases depending on your performance and durability needs:

Data Center DC1000B – M.2 (2280) NVMe Server Boot Drive (SSD) – 240GB -960GB - Kingston Technology

The DC1000B is an M.2 (2280) NVMe Server Boot Drive (SSD), available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities. It’s enhanced for boot workloads as well as caching and logging applications with power loss protection (PLP) and frees up drive bays for additional storage. Applications such as CDNs, edge...

www.kingston.com

I plan on pairing these with the HighPoint bootable RAID controller:

HighPoint SSD7103 Ultimate NVMe Bootable RAID Solution

Simple upgrade solution for your Workstations & Servers.

highpoint-tech.com

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hello Antony. Always nice to have another data point for the PLP-supporting Kingston devices; although as you said, their target market being a "boot drive" doesn't necessarily mean they'll be screaming fast for heavy write usage.

The HighPoint RAID card is interesting - since it has a PLX chip onboard, it wouldn't seem to require support for PCIe bifurcation on the motherboard. Though make sure not to enable any of the "RAID" functionality - just let it pass four devices through and enjoy. (And if you're looking for SLOG performance, using the other two slots for a pair of Optane P4801X cards would probably be a fantastic plan.)

 

[devilkin]

Hey Everyone,

I stumbled upon this thread while looking for PLP-enabled M.2 NVMe drives. It looks like Kingston now sells these and are aimed specifically for use as boot drives, but I'm sure they have more general use cases depending on your performance and durability needs:

Data Center DC1000B – M.2 (2280) NVMe Server Boot Drive (SSD) – 240GB -960GB - Kingston Technology

The DC1000B is an M.2 (2280) NVMe Server Boot Drive (SSD), available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities. It’s enhanced for boot workloads as well as caching and logging applications with power loss protection (PLP) and frees up drive bays for additional storage. Applications such as CDNs, edge...

www.kingston.com

Is it anywhere certain that these devices are actually proper PLP and not the other crappy sort if implementations that are mentioned in this thread?

 

[Octopuss]

Nope, just had one kill my NUC actually. I mean, MAYBE that's Windows 10's fault, but having the drive come up as unrecognized boot media altogether? It re-imaged just fine. No SMART errors reported...

Good I have UPS then :D But I might want one with PLP for the ESXi anyway.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Good I have UPS then :D But I might want one with PLP for the ESXi anyway.

You don't need PLP for a vSphere boot device; as long as you redirect scratch and syslog elsewhere, it will run perfectly off of cheap USB sticks.

 

[Octopuss]

I have no idea what those things are, and I don't intend to make a home server overcomplicated.
Anyway, with an UPS you don't need any PLP anyway.

Oh and can anyone explain how can a NVMe SSD have such pathetic write speed like the Kingston linked above? 550MB/s or so, what the heck?
Oh wait, the 240GB is not even 300MB/s. That's ridiculous. Who would buy that? That's crap even for a boot drive. I mean it's a SSD, not USB stick.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I have no idea what those things are, and I don't intend to make a home server overcomplicated.

Those are both fairly important things in a vSphere configuration, having logs available helps with troubleshooting or monitoring.

Anyway, with an UPS you don't need any PLP anyway.

I'm interested to hear how an external UPS would solve the problem of your PSU suddenly failing. ;)

True end-to-end PLP is also what makes certain drives suitable for use as SLOG devices, since their RAM can be considered non-volatile.

Oh and can anyone explain how can a NVMe SSD have such pathetic write speed like the Kingston linked above? 550MB/s or so, what the heck?
Oh wait, the 240GB is not even 300MB/s. That's ridiculous. Who would buy that? That's crap even for a boot drive. I mean it's a SSD, not USB stick.

It's not designed to be fast on writes - this keeps costs down, and as long as the device still provides good read speeds, users will likely be very happy with it.

 

[Octopuss]

Sure it's not meant for performance, but how can it have SO low speed being a NVMe drive? I mean not even close to SATA SSDs for the lower capacity. That escapes me.

 

[HoneyBadger]

NVMe is just a protocol - think of it as the highway in the traditional car analogy. A slow car won't go any faster just because it's on the Autobahn of interfaces.

 

[Quavo]

Do the m.2 intel optanes have full plp support like the 905p and etc or does nothing have full plp support? Also on the topic of m.2 plp does this thing actually work, is this a thing lol? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32608501110.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.3eea3c00iug4H2&mp=1 (Adapter Card to PCI-E x4 Power-off protection for M.2 NGFF MZHPU128HCGM MZHPU512HCGL XP941 SM951 M6E PM951 PM950 PRO SSD)

 

[Yorick]

Do the m.2 intel optanes have full plp support like the 905p and etc or does nothing have full plp support?

I think the idea with Optane is that because there's no DRAM in front of NAND, and every acknowledged write is written through directly, there's no need for PLP circuitry. See https://www.servethehome.com/intel-optane-905p-380gb-m-2-nvme-ssd-review-the-best/2/

A P4801x 100GB is not as fast as the 905p in throughput, but it's durable, the "enterprise DC option", has the same low latency, and costs considerably less than that 905p. That seems like a decent "budget" option, if the board can take a 110mm M.2 and has the cooling for it.

Intel Optane DC P4801X Review 100GB M.2 NVMe SSD Log Option

In our Intel Optane DC P4801X review, we show how this drive performs compared to other options as a ZFS ZIL or SLOG device or other write cache application

www.servethehome.com

 

[HoneyBadger]

Also on the topic of m.2 plp does this thing actually work, is this a thing lol? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32608501110.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.3eea3c00iug4H2&mp=1 (Adapter Card to PCI-E x4 Power-off protection for M.2 NGFF MZHPU128HCGM MZHPU512HCGL XP941 SM951 M6E PM951 PM950 PRO SSD)

It's a "thing" in that it will consume power and provide a neat storage of energy that could be catastrophically released. Unfortunately it won't actually impact the ability of the drive to respond any differently to a cache flush request. Short answer, it won't make a non-PLP drive a good candidate for an SLOG.

 

[horizonbrave]

Sorry for intrusion:
just wonder if a link to this list has alrady been included in documentation section.
Thanks!

 

[Dekoeffizient]

The Samsung PM883 drives seem to also fully featured powerloss protection. To quote the datasheet header 7.2:

"When the sudden power-off occurs, the user data in DRAM will be dumped into to NAND
Flash using the stored power in the capacitor".

These drives seem to be really cost effective in my region, new being around 10 to 20 bucks cheaper than Intel SSDs which don't feature a cache, which those drives do.

 

[piperfect]

I ordered a Samsung 983 DCT 2.5" and a PCIe adapter. I will see how it goes.
Seems like the best ~$200 solution I can find.

 

[dwchan69]

Can Intel Octane M.2 work with AMD motherboard like Gigabtye X399 series?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Can Intel Octane M.2 work with AMD motherboard like Gigabtye X399 series?

Yes. Specific Intel boards are only required for the use of Optane drives as a transparent cache for the Windows operating system.

TrueNAS doesn't need to see the two devices as a single unit, and has no such requirement. It will see the Optane drive as a regular NVMe device.

 

[Tsuroerusu]

Micron's 7300 and 5300 series of SSDs also have power loss protection. The 7300 is NVMe and is available in both U.2 and M.2 variants. The 5300 is SATA and is available in 2.5" and M.2 variants. I found this really useful given that M.2 SSDs with PLP are pretty hard to find.

 

[horizonbrave]

someone in this old (2018) Hacker News discussion seems to assume that "even in the enterprise market, M2 form factor SSDs rarely have these capacitors, because they don't really help. They are more common on PCIE-card devices.
The on-disk/flash format that these drives use has a journaling system much like modern filesystems do, so they know if blocks were not fully written. This feature alone almost completely negates any need for. I have committed patches and code to UBIFS and I am very familiar with how modern flash filesystems work at the hardware level. Backup caps are just not really needed."

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