Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What is a SAS SSD?”.
Listen, I came down here to have a little fun, with some old servers and upgrading it and building our own 25 gig e infrastructure and just to see how how low I could go, and it occurred to me that a lot of people may not realize that. Hey did you know you can buy brand new serial attached, scuzzy ssds, it’s kind of weird, because serial attached, scy SSD shouldn’t exist, but the only thing that’s holding back a lot of otherwise reasonably okay servers is the fact that they still have mechanical hard drives in Them like these 10,000 RPM 15,000 RPM. These are Enterprise grade 2 and 1 12 in Drive. These are not notebook drives these uh these they they run, they run hot.
They burn twice as bright, but last half as long mechanical hard drives: 10 15,000 RPM yeah they’re. In a lot of servers, probably should have aged out a long time ago, but there is an option. Let me explain so, as I was doing this video, if you have an older server that is not quite obsolete, that’s running from mechanical hard drives you’d.
Be surprised how recently Dell or HP or Lenovo or super micro or anybody would sell you. You know Enterprise class mechanical hard drives. Nobody ever got fired for buying the same thing. Even as ssds entered the mainstream. You know the wear mechanism of ssds is sort of interesting. You know this drive has sectors on it that can be Rewritten millions of times, but this drive is designed to Last 5 Years, and so, if you push the envelope with mechanical 10,000 and especially 15,000 RPM drives, they tend not to last a lot longer than five Years unless they had a really easy life and you could have an isake Zeon server or a second gen epic server – that has mechanical hard drives instead of storage.
But you know these are 600 gigabytes or 900 gigabytes or 1.2 terabytes. This is 8 terabytes in this tiny little package, and this uses a fraction of the power of a 15,000 RPM, 2 and 1 half inch drive a tiny fraction. This one drive will outperform the entire array of 12 or 15 of these just the one. So if you replace all of them heck yeah, that’s pretty good.
The problem that SSD facturers ran into is that you know the most convenient interface, the one that makes sense for this is nvme. The problem is that very few Server Chassis that are out there in the market are designed to have a lot of nvmes connect in the front lot. Not a lot of chassis were designed with that kind of foresite and SATA is a step backwards in terms of reliability, connectivity, etc, etc. Serial attached skuzzy, you can have dual pathing, which means that you have redundant controllers, there’s really a lot there uh in terms of signal, integrity and differential.
That signaling is a little different yeah. You can use a SATA drive on a Serial attached, scy controller, but giving up all of the features of Serial attached scuzzy a lot of enterprisers are not really ready to do that. Replacing you know it’s like we’re going to replace this with the Samsung Evo uh. You know 860, I don’t that doesn’t make anybody feel good. That’S not it’s not! It’S not a great idea, because those are devices that are manufactured with different uh use cases and tolerances in mind where, as this is designed to truly be an Enterprise, product, pm7 and so kokia can’t sell enough of them now where’s the cutof point. Well, we did this pretty fun video, where we were setting up 25 gig ethernet on these machines that you see behind me and that’s what sort of inspired this video if you’ve got like Broadwell socket 2011, even if it was like the most expensive Broadwell ever. Those are trash, you should let those go just get rid of them.
Those are 8, 10, 12 years old. At this point, just let it go Skylake. If you had a like a low end or middle of the road Sky Lake system, it’s probably ready to go that socket 3647.
There was Cascade Lake right after that same socket again, Lower tier or middle of the road. You got that zeeon bronze! Sorry, it’s trash! Don’T know what to tell you if you got something a little newer than that, if you had, you know a dual socket: top-of-the-line Sky lake or Cascade Lake, and it had serial attached skazzy hard drives. This could let you get another couple of years out of that chassis, not doing a software migration upgrade the next new hot thing coming down the pike. What you got to realize is the last two or three generations of server. Every generation has been so insanely way, faster thanks to the competition in the market that these older systems really are just accelerating right into the trash. It’S mindblowing that we’re seeing this much gen on gen uplift like if you have a second gen epic and you’re. Comparing that against modern, you know Genoa CPUs on a ddr5 platform for AMD there. It’S there’s no comparison. It’S a night and day difference. At the same time, Rome and uh, Milan generation AMD and Cascade Lake ice Lake, sci-fi Rapids, is still current.
You know those are perfectly reasonable. Serviceable servers, uh Cascade legs, getting a little long in the tooth, but those are perfectly reasonable. Serviceable servers, as long as you have an SSD and the difference in upgrading a server from a whole array of these to this is just as much as you would think that it would be. I mean if you’ve upgraded from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD in your home machine. It’S like that, but for servers and the reason that some servers were still shipping even just three or four or five years ago, with mechanical hard drives. Is the endurance and uh wear uh question? Well, the question has been answered at this point and it can be not fabulous, but if you have an Enterprise SSD that has been engineered with lots of extra flash redundancy built in than acquiring a 4 or 8 tbte serial attached, scuzzy SSD. That is going to be able to handle. You know one full drive rewrite per day.
Uh is attainable and affordable. The other thing is, you can use your your tools on the server to actually see since you’ve. Had you know the server installed that you’re looking at doing a drive upgrade you can run the tools and see what is the total amount of Drive Right Lifetime on this? So with these drives, there’s an internal counter.
That tells you exactly how many read and write operations they have and that’s accessible through smart Diagnostics. So all you need to do is boot off of a Linux CD or go into your RAID controller software, or even into the management controller from Dell or HP or whoever and pull that information. This you know if this drive has been in service in one of your systems for three years over three years, how many gigabytes or terabytes of information have been written to the drive? Look at that number think about.
Okay, this system is going to be in use for what another 3 four years do math and then look at the endurance on something like this and know that you can count on these drives to live up to their endurance numbers. The industry’s been watching those numbers very very closely. So if this thing says you could do one drive right per day, you definitely do one drive right per day. I’Ve done torture, tests with Anvil and I’ve really uh done terrible things to shred ssds, not just with kokia going all the way back to Toshiba and Toshiba historically has been very conservatively engineered. I have drives that are in the field field that have far exceeded their Drive Right Lifetime and yeah. They are starting to get a little sketchy, but because theyve far exceeded their Drive lifetime.
Far above and beyond their specification. I consider that a win – and this is the multi petabyte range – that we’re talking about for 256 gigabyte flash drives so yeah. The hesitancy around flash in the Enterprise is hilariously unfounded, in my opinion, in 2024, and it’s just there’s something I mean it’s so anachronistic.
It’S like, okay, we don’t you know, there’s servers out there with SAS SSD and Hardware. Raid controllers and people aren’t comfortable moving to an entirely new platform with nvme and we don’t have solutions for some problems for this in some scenarios, but by and large it’s basically okay, okay. Well, let’s make a middle tier product that will let you drop flash into the middle of your serial attached, scy ecosystem and that’s what this is.
This is a serial attached, scuzzy ecosystem product that uh technically shouldn’t need to exist, but because we’re in this middle of the road thing it does exist for now like this is not a new product going forward. This was meant to shore up some things that we have in the past in the form of legacy, and so that’s really cool that that kind of a product exists, and it’s really cool that you don’t have to use a a SATA drive through because like if One of these drives dies. What are you gon na do? Get another 15,000 RPM mechanical hard drive.
I mean you probably should, if it’s going into an array so that it matches everything else. Theoretically, you could replace that with a SATA, hard drive which, again, if anything, went wrong with that you’d probably be fired in your job for trying it, and yet that’s probably not the worst solution to that problem. But this this is the correct solution to that problem. It’S like hey: we’ve got like 10 900 gig drives in this array. Let’S just replace them with this. Assuming that you’re, you know controller and everything else supports it, which is another dimension of crazy here. So Dell HP Enterprise They qualify. These drives and kokia is working hard to get them qualified in different Sands, so you would have to reach out and figure out. Okay is this? One supported? Is that one supported you may have to get a version of these that has a Dell uh sticker on it, for example, but would still be the same kind of a drive underneath it is an option that you have.
You just need to reach out and and make that happen, a lot of things like these Cisco UCS servers. They’Ll complain a little bit, but it works anyway and I’m very happy and delighted that it works this way anyway, because you know there are people in the level one community that are hanging on to slightly newer. You know UCS servers and slightly newer Dell and HP Enterprise servers, and some of them merely complain. They still work, but they’ll complain as opposed to being locked down. There’S some sand appliances that will you know they want a specific flash drive and even if you have that specific flash drive, unless it has the OEM firmware on it, it will not work, and that is annoying. I get why they do that, because if something goes wrong, you know it’s very, very bad, that something went wrong, so it’s kind of like you’re between a rock and a hard place, but at the same time a lot of these companies don’t charge a reasonable markup.
It’S more like two and a half times to five times the cost of the device. That’S too much! It’S like we’re going to double the cost of the device. Did you really put that much engineering into the firmware? Did you really did you maybe like 25 % 33 %, 50 %, Maybe but that’s a complaint for another day that you can join me among the many others on the level, one forums who have made similar complaints like? Why does this drive with theel firmware costs? So much probably better off getting used on eBay if you want new and stable and Enterprise engineered pm7 and I’m sort of delighted that a product like that exists, but also it is anachronistic that such a product exists. I don’t know fun times, I’m this level one. I’M signing out and you should check out our other videos where we built the 25 gbit sand from from garbage um. It’S okay, it’s not as good is something that you buy, but it does hold its own at 25.
Gig, all right, I’m signing out! You can find me in the level one point for .