HPE Solid State Drives (SSDs)-why they differ in price and applications.
Reading Time-approximately: 5 minutesHPE SSDs are suited to enterprise environments with highly random data under a variety of
write-workload applications.
By Tekmart Enterprise Support Team
HPE SSDs are a drop-in replacement for existing HDDs. They fit into existing HDD hot-plug bays and require no modification to operating system or infrastructure tools. The drives are recognized as standard SAS or SATA devices with no special changes in firmware or hardware. Although you cannot mix SSDs and HDDs in the same logical array, you can mix them within the system to provide a more effective use of both technologies.
The SSDs provide significantly better random read and write I/O operations per second (IOPS) compared to HDDs. While sequential read and write throughput is also improved over HDDs, the greatest benefit is recognized in random data applications. As a result, these high-performance, low-latency, and low-power SSDs provide significant system benefits for applications that previously over-provisioned HDD capacity to achieve better performance.
HPE SSDs enable rapid reads and writes of transactional data. SSDs have no moving parts or rotating platters that
can cause latency problems, and that results in faster access to data. Therefore, with faster seek times, the drives achieve high IOPS, producing quicker data access and better latency.
HPE Solid State Drives have the key features you need in your data center—full data path error detection, surprise power loss protection, and HPE SmartSSD Wear Gauge support.
HPE enables the SmartSSD Wear Gauge through the HPE Smart Carrier. With the SmartSSD Wear Gauge utility, HPE SSDs monitor the amount of data written and report when the device may be nearing its maximum supported lifetime.
Targeted at extreme operating environments or local storage, these drives provide higher I/O throughput, excellent latency, reduced power consumption, enhanced reliability, and faster reads and writes when compared to traditional rotating media. They remove the latency found in conventional rotating HDDs caused by seek time for each read operation, so they deliver high random read performance. Most of these SSDs are available as small form factor (SFF),
large form factor (LFF), quick release carriers, or non-hot plug (NHP) for general use across the HPE ProLiant Server portfolio.
The drives are fully qualified and fit seamlessly into the existing HPE server infrastructure. With no moving parts, more reliability, and greater power savings than traditional rotating media drives, SSDs are finding new applications in the Big Data era.
HPE SSDs are fully tested and qualified to enable compatibility with HPE ProLiant, HPE Synergy, and HPE BladeSystem solutions. The HPE Qualified Option designation places HPE SSDs among the best of the best compared to products available on the open market.
It is important to note that SSDs on the open market—even those with similar vendor model numbers—may not have the same level of performance, endurance, and quality as HPE Qualified Options. For example, the NAND or even the controller in non-qualified products may be different from an HPE Qualified Option. HPE firmware optimizes our qualified SSD performance, wear leveling, and over-provisioning.
You also get an outstanding product when you buy from HPE—and a three-year warranty.
The right SSD for every application HPE SSDs are available in three broad categories based on their typical target workloads:
Read Intensive, Mixed Use and Write Intensive.
The HPE SSDs categories include both SAS SSDs and also SATA SSDs. The categories indicate the number of drive writes per day (DWPD1 ) that you can expect from the drive. (DWPD is the maximum number of 4K host writes to the entire drive capacity of the SSD per day over a five-year period.)
- Read Intensive SSDs are typically the lowest price, with a typical Endurance of <= 1 DWPD.
- Write Intensive SSDs typically have the highest Write performance, with a typical Endurance of >= 10 DWPD.
- Mixed Use SSDs are for workloads that need a balance of strong Read and Write performance, with Endurance typically >1 and <10 DWPD.
HPE Write Intensive Solid State Drives
HPE Write Intensive 12G SAS SSDs provide high write performance and endurance. They are best suited for mission-critical enterprise environments with workloads high in both reads and writes. Workloads best suited for these WI SSDs include online transaction processing (OLTP), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), business intelligence, and Big Data Analytics.
HPE Mixed Use Solid State Drives
HPE Mixed Use 12G SAS and 6G SATA SSDs are best suited for high I/O applications with workloads balanced between reads and writes. The SAS and SATA SSDs provide the workload-optimized performance required for demanding I/O-intensive applications. When paired with HPE ProLiant servers, these SSDs help you meet the challenges of Big Data. They achieve twice the performance and endurance of previous HPE SAS and SATA SSDs.
The SATA SSDs come with a six gigabit per second (Gb/s) SATA hot-plug interface. HPE Read Intensive Solid State Drives HPE Read Intensive 12G SAS and 6G SATA SSDs deliver enterprise features for a low price in HPE ProLiant server systems.
This entry-level pricing is fueling rapid SSD adoption for read-intensive workloads because the cost per IOPS compares very favorably to HDDs. Read Intensive SSDs deliver great performance for workloads high in reads such as boot/swap, Web servers, and read caching, just to name a few.
HPE Read Intensive M.2 Solid State Enablement Kits
The HPE M.2 Solid State Enablement Kit is the newest addition to our Read Intensive solid state drive family and is best suited for boot/swap. The M.2 Solid State Enablement Kit is available in dual and single 64 GB capacity with an endurance of 0.3 drive writes per day (DWPD).
The kits are compatible to ProLiant Gen9 Blades and currently support a 6 Gb SATA interface. Also, the dual and single 120 GB capacity is available in the M.2 Enablement Kit and currently supports ProLiant ML/DL servers.
SAS or SATA interface available
HPE has a full portfolio of 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs. The SAS SSDs transfer data at full duplex (bidirectional) allowing greater I/O bandwidth to alleviate bottlenecks. Additionally SAS uses SCSI commands for error recovery and error reporting, which have more functionality than the ATA command set used by Serial ATA (SATA). HPE has a 12 Gb/s SAS Expander to scale storage capacity for multi-workload needs.
SATA SSDs are great in half-duplex (unidirectional) direct connect scenarios when lower price is a priority
Boost performance with HPE NVMe PCIe 2.5” SSDs
HPE NVMe PCIe 2.5” SSDs talk directly to your applications via the PCIe bus, boosting I/O and reducing latency to scale performance in line with your processing requirements. This means, for example, that you can host your entire database on one or more HPE NVMe PCIe 2.5″ SSDs for enhanced in-memory access and performance.
NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express, is a from-the-ground-up industry specification that focuses on efficiency, scalability, and performance. With the introduction of NVMe, an industry interface specification for accessing solid-state storage through PCI Express, manufacturers have a set of guidelines that seeks to release them from the limitations of previous standards, and also provides a wide range of interoperability benefits.
And lastly, when to choose any of SATA, SSD or NVMe drives.
There are a lot of considerations when deciding between different components. You have to choose what fits your technical, capacity and budget requirements. Below are some guidelines that may help, and while they won’t fit every situation, you may find them useful when planning your next server build.
You may want to consider a SATA drive if you:
- Need a large amount of storage
- Are on a tight budget
- Need a general purpose hard disk
You might want to consider an SSD drive if you:
- Are upgrading a server.
- Need fast storage under 2TB (latest SSDs can support sizes greater than 2TB)
You might be better served by an NVMe drive if you:
- Are building a high-end custom server.
- Don’t have a budget constraint.
- Are building a server that is going to host a storage-intensive application.
It’s also worth mentioning that you’re not limited to buying just one hard drive; Server and / or storage systems can typically support several at a time. And whether you get the performance you want from it will depend on where you save files. For example, a common configuration for PCs or servers that render video is to use a faster drive like an SSD or NVMe to run video rendering software (Camtasia, Adobe Premier, etc.) and then transfer the finished product to a cheaper, larger SATA drive.
