[Info-vax] 3rd party SATA SSD usage on RX2660+P400 in a production environment?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-07-02 13:49:49 +0000, Rod Regier said:

> The 12G drives that David @ Islandco mentioned are 12G for max data 
> rate, not capacity.

SSD needs a fast bus.  HDD... not so much.  Sure, fast bursts of data 
separated by glacial waits as the rotating rust spins, and all...

And the P400 you're referencing is 3G.  Not 12G.

> "B9F50A HPE 200GB 12G SAS SSD Enteprise SFF Drive"

I'm not sure I could find storage that small and that comparatively 
slow, outside of the "enterprise", and maybe the "bargain bin".

> Those *are" much closer to my price point than current new production 
> HPE SAS SSD drives in the distribution chain.

Well, HDD versus SDD...

> My target upgrade audience are existing RX2660 customers with (or could 
> be upgraded to) P400 cards.

Given you started out with third-party hardware, maybe do your own 
hardware qualifications, then?  That's how this works.  P400 is old and 
slow, and its inherent limits also means internal storage which means 
using the HP/HPE SFF sleds.

You'll likely find that at least some of the third-party SSDs with 512e 
support will work, but the lack of TRIM on OpenVMS means you'll want to 
look for SSDs that handle sector-erase as TRIM.  Or you'll have very 
slow writes.

The "gas gauge" SSD support in OpenVMS likely won't work with a 
third-party SSD.

And in two or three years, we'll either be starting to replace these 
existing servers with x86-64 and ports to that, or we'll be starting up 
the Linux ports again.




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