NVMe support?

[cyberjock]

Hilarious! This thread was fun to read. Why? Because we've hashed all this stuff out years ago..and somehow some people still don't get the memo, show up here, and then try to tell us how stuff like Samsung is better.

 

[Something]

Hilarious! This thread was fun to read. Why? Because we've hashed all this stuff out years ago..and somehow some people still don't get the memo, show up here, and then try to tell us how stuff like Samsung is better.

Admittedly they're not bad, but after the 840 EVO catastrophe i'm not particularly enthused with Samsung.

For consumer stuff, they're among the best of the best (emphasis on consumer). Samsung being able to make their own controller and fabricate the NAND gives them a large advantage over many others. Good power usage, excellent performance, great pricing...

---

I'll still have to get back to you on SLOG performance. Ran into some complicatiaries.

 

[cyberjock]

Samsung being able to make their own controller and fabricate the NAND gives them a large advantage over many others. Good power usage, excellent performance, great pricing...

But reliability with storing data that is... lacking. ;)

And who cares about power usage! Whatever SSD you are using is going to use far less power than spinning disks anyway.

For me, performance is important, but not as important as reliability. Something the EVO's have/are having major problems with.

 

[jgreco]

And who cares about power usage! Whatever SSD you are using is going to use far less power than spinning disks anyway.

Depends. Some of the high end SSD's chew as much as a laptop drive.

 

[cyberjock]

Depends. Some of the high end SSD's chew as much as a laptop drive.

I probably wouldn't have noticed. Besides, at a couple of watts we're talking something pretty inconsequential. If you're really concerned about power and/or heat generation, that's probably your primary attribute for choosing what media to use. ;)

 

[jgreco]

I probably wouldn't have noticed. Besides, at a couple of watts we're talking something pretty inconsequential. If you're really concerned about power and/or heat generation, that's probably your primary attribute for choosing what media to use. ;)

Yeah, I've been experimenting with 2TB 2.5" laptop drives on the VM storage filer here and while not totally awesome I am reasonably happy. If I could justify the cost of ~4X to move that to 1TB SSD's I'm sure it'd be even more zippy. Seen it pushing 9+Gbps on dual 10Gbps as iSCSI datastore doing I/O in a single VM...

 

[toadman]

The "high-end" SSDs can still chew 25W each.

 

[jgreco]

The "high-end" SSDs can still chew 25W each.

I hadn't noticed anything that bad in awhile but it's certainly believable.

 

[cyberjock]

The "high-end" SSDs can still chew 25W each.

25 watts? is that a typo? That's like.. multiple desktop drives.

 

[HoneyBadger]

25 watts? is that a typo? That's like.. multiple desktop drives.

The new P3700 2TB eats 25W at full blast ... but outside of the NVMe space pretty much everything is <10W if not <5W.

 

[jgreco]

Wow, a NEW drive that chews that. Holy crap

 

[toadman]

Unfortunately not. Just check the specs on the large capacity PCIe SSDs. (or any large capacity SSD) All that nand sucks power. Fusion, HGST, Micron, etc...

Most of the 2.5" stuff is 9W so it can live in a standard drive bay.

 

[cyberjock]

Sure, but I don't consider NVMe cards to be "SSDs" in the traditional sense. A 25W SSD would likely burn up in no time because of the heat generation and relatively low heat transfer surface area.

 

[toadman]

Yea, they are SSDs in the sense they are block storage. Most application stacks can't make use of it anyway. In many applications a 2U filled with 24 2.5" SATA SSDs will smoke anything else.

 

[Ericloewe]

Sure, but I don't consider NVMe cards to be "SSDs" in the traditional sense. A 25W SSD would likely burn up in no time because of the heat generation and relatively low heat transfer surface area.

Well, going forward, we'll be seeing NVMe SSDs both in the PCI-e card format and the 2.5" format, so it's going to have to be fixed/worked around one way or another.

 

[Something]

But reliability with storing data that is... lacking. ;)

And who cares about power usage! Whatever SSD you are using is going to use far less power than spinning disks anyway.

For me, performance is important, but not as important as reliability. Something the EVO's have/are having major problems with.

Admittedly that is with regards to consumer, not enterprise loads. For enterprise loads you wouldn't even want to consider the EVOs as they lack power loss protections.

Depends. Some of the high end SSD's chew as much as a laptop drive.

Newer Sammy/Sandisk drives will chomp less than a laptop drive. <5w a piece. Efficiency given their speed also makes them massively advantageous from a power usage perspective. Slap an SSD into an old laptop, you'll actually notice a battery life improvement.

Well, going forward, we'll be seeing NVMe SSDs both in the PCI-e card format and the 2.5" format, so it's going to have to be fixed/worked around one way or another.

Doubtful, NVMe for SATA3 is a complete waste. M.2/PCIe or bust. SATA3 is a bottleneck for the higher end SSDs on the market. Perhaps for cheapo SSDs...

Sure, but I don't consider NVMe cards to be "SSDs" in the traditional sense. A 25W SSD would likely burn up in no time because of the heat generation and relatively low heat transfer surface area.

Those Intel enterprise SSDs come with fairly large heatsinks to dissipate all that heat. So not a big issue.

The new P3700 2TB eats 25W at full blast ... but outside of the NVMe space pretty much everything is <10W if not <5W.

NVMe drives actually are MORE efficient than normal SSDs. Apple purchased a company working on SSD controllers and had them design the NVMe controller utilized in the new Macbook's PCIe SSD.

NVMe is more efficient, not less, by all metrics, utilizing less CPU horsepower and completing tasks faster meaning more time idling. Things like the P3700 are misrepresentative of what NVMe brings to the table.

 

[Ericloewe]

Doubtful, NVMe for SATA3 is a complete waste. M.2/PCIe or bust. SATA3 is a bottleneck for the higher end SSDs on the market. Perhaps for cheapo SSDs...

NVMe has nothing to do with SATA.
2.5" NVMe drives use a PCI-e connection over a new (or is it the SAS3?) connector/cable system. All signalling is PCI-e (the logical layer could be AHCI, but that is silly, so NVMe is the standard).

 

[jgreco]

Admittedly that is with regards to consumer, not enterprise loads. For enterprise loads you wouldn't even want to consider the EVOs as they lack power loss protections.

That depends on what your use case is. I certainly have enterprise loads where the EVO's would be perfect. Lots of random read, modest amounts of write, no major crisis in the rare case where something gets lost.

Newer Sammy/Sandisk drives will chomp less than a laptop drive. <5w a piece. Efficiency given their speed also makes them massively advantageous from a power usage perspective. Slap an SSD into an old laptop, you'll actually notice a battery life improvement.

Yes, but we weren't really talking about that. The point is that SSD can sometimes consume more than HDD. Again, it is sensitive to what your use case is. I'd love to cram a bunch of SSD's into our new filer but making the project 3x-4x the cost is just a total nonstarter.

Doubtful, NVMe for SATA3 is a complete waste. M.2/PCIe or bust.

I don't know. I'm not sure how you'd stick 24 PCIe NVMe drives into a 2U server. I do know you could fit them in as 2.5" units.

 

[Something]

NVMe has nothing to do with SATA.
2.5" NVMe drives use a PCI-e connection over a new (or is it the SAS3?) connector/cable system. All signalling is PCI-e (the logical layer could be AHCI, but that is silly, so NVMe is the standard).

The SATA Express abomination?

That depends on what your use case is. I certainly have enterprise loads where the EVO's would be perfect. Lots of random read, modest amounts of write, no major crisis in the rare case where something gets lost.
Mmmm, cheaper Enterprise SSDs equivical to 850 EVOs are upon us. Read-centric drives.

Yes, but we weren't really talking about that. The point is that SSD can sometimes consume more than HDD. Again, it is sensitive to what your use case is. I'd love to cram a bunch of SSD's into our new filer but making the project 3x-4x the cost is just a total nonstarter.

I don't know. I'm not sure how you'd stick 24 PCIe NVMe drives into a 2U server. I do know you could fit them in as 2.5" units.

Good point, enterprise will still want storage density, though i've been focusing on consumer and enterprise in a really flipflop manner.

 

[Ericloewe]

The SATA Express abomination?

No, it's a completely different connector/cable system, SFF-8639.

http://anandtech.com/show/9363/sff8639-connector-renamed-as-u2