4 ms·

I just bought 30x new 64GB X25-E 50nm Intel SSDs from 2011 from ebay, they are SLC and should manage 100.000 writes per bit and I don't think we'll ever see tha

by bullen 5y ago

I just bought 30x new 64GB X25-E 50nm Intel SSDs from 2011 from ebay, they are SLC and should manage 100.000 writes per bit and I don't think we'll ever see that kind of quality again. I'm going to use EXT4 (with type small because my custom distributed database writes many small JSON files) and hope for the best on my Atom 8/16-core machines that have 12 SATA ports. I wont use raid but instead plan to mount these "manually". Would love some feedback! :S

wtallis 5y ago
If you want to mess around with small fast drives with high endurance relative to their capacity, you should consider the less outdated Intel Optane Memory cache drives, which are also far faster than ancient 3Gbps SATA drives.
- bullen 5y ago
  I saw those on ebay but the connector was weird also I don't need more speed, these machines will be behind 2x separate home 1Gb/s (up and down) fiber... Another thing I had to consider was power since I plan to back these up with lead-acid batteries for power outages. These drives draw 2W when active... so that is 18W for 8x (512GB) DB drives and one OS drive! Compared to the 25/32W of the 8/16-core motherboards that's alot... but mechanical drives are insane on electricity, up to 10W per drive!!! But good point, do you know what connector tese use?
  - wtallis 5y ago
    The Optane Memory drives use a M.2 connector, keyed for carrying two lanes of PCI Express 3.0, over which they use the NVMe protocol. If you're concerned about battery life, you really shouldn't be using lots of small drives, especially when the controllers are so ancient. You'll get at least 5x the performance per Watt from a single newer flash-based SSD and much better idle power behavior. Consumer SSDs also offer much more in the way of low-power idle states than enterprise SSDs. At the extreme, you can get a $75 512GB drive that provides significantly more performance than 8x X25-Es in aggregate, while never reaching 3W power draw under load and idling at under 10mW.
    - bullen 5y ago
      Sure but the 100.000 writes per bit!? To me data integrity and longevity are paramount! These have same idle power btw, but ofcourse 2W on read/write is bad but I rather use these $1000 in 2011 50nm SLC industrial drives and compress my database than buy some MLC/TLC/QLC drive made today with 14nm!
      - wtallis 5y ago
        You should be aware that SSDs perform wear leveling, so the key metric is not how many program/erase cycles the underlying flash can handle on a per-block basis, but the total amount of writes the drive can handle, usually expressed in TB or PB. Unless you have measured your own workload in enough detail to know otherwise, it is extremely unlikely you actually need to use SLC NAND. The market has almost completely abandoned SLC NAND for good reason, and your use case probably isn't that special (though if it is, I'm sure we could have an interesting conversation about it). Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that a modern TLC SSD could easily fulfill your actual write endurance and data retention requirements, because that's the conclusion that has been reached by all of the big corporations who have been using modern SSDs in production at scale.
        bullen 5y ago
        Maybe, but I'm factoring in the time spent on maintenance at 100x the cost because that is not something I want me or my kids to have to do ever! Meaning with 5 million customers on my MMO we have 250 years of all of them playing every day with these drives. Which gives us margin!
        gpapilion 5y ago
        The wildcard here is the garbage collection in the drive, and bad firmware with high write amplification. I’ve seen TLC devices go bad within a year where the vendor optimized for full page P/E cycles. That said these were high transaction server workloads, and typical home use would be challenged to get to that kind of wear.
boris 5y ago
In my experience the weak point here is the controller/firmware. We bought a bunch of high-endurance Enterprise MLC drives (also Intel but newer) and one of them has already bricked itself, way before reaching any kind of wear worth mentioning.
- imtringued 5y ago
  This is extremely common with old SSDs.
- bullen 5y ago
  Ok, so I will google firmware patches, thx!
  - willis936 5y ago
    A firmware patch doesn't fix thermal runaway on a linear regulator. Don't trust media too much.
    - bullen 5y ago
      I plan to mount these vertically outside the case for optimal passive thermal cooling. I think these are not much worse off than todays drives when it comes to heat, maybe I should strip the 2.5" cases! Good point! Unless we have a EMP! ;) Edit: I found my M2 spacers I ordered by mistake 5 years ago, they are a bit wide at 18mm but that is good for thermals! Genious! Edit2: Ordered 6mm spacers! You can get an idea how it will look here: http://move.rupy.se/file/SSD_unit.png http://move.rupy.se/file/SSD_unit.png
      - willis936 5y ago
        Heat over time matters, but the thermal runaway scenario I referenced is the most common failure mechanism I know of in small electronics. It's just something that they do. It's not a matter of if, but when. More important than cooling is the voltage rails. Reliable PSUs that don't overvolt the load under any scenario are important.
michaelt 5y ago
> I don't think we'll ever see that kind of quality again. Some companies still make new "psuedo-SLC" drives [1] which store a single bit per flash cell. The downside is they're expensive: $1/gigabyte instead of $0.1/gigabyte. And at that price, RAID mirroring starts to look like a great deal! [1] https://uk.farnell.com/c/office-computer-networking-products/computer-products/drives/solid-state-ssd-drives?st=pslc https://uk.farnell.com/c/office-computer-networking-products...
- bullen 5y ago
  I got these drives at $0.6/GB... These drives seem to be built like tanks and they fill the 2.5" enclosure to the brim. They are also the first drive with RAM buffer on the read lane which is interesting in it's own right; meaning the motherboard never have to wait for writes but the disk have to wait for the motherboard on reads!!!
rkagerer 5y ago
I have several, similar X25-M's still in use over a decade, they are great drives.
- bullen 5y ago
  Good to hear, M are MLC I think so the X25-E should be even better!?

by bullen 5y ago

wtallis 5y ago

If you want to mess around with small fast drives with high endurance relative to their capacity, you should consider the less outdated Intel Optane Memory cache drives, which are also far faster than ancient 3Gbps SATA drives.

bullen 5y ago
I saw those on ebay but the connector was weird also I don't need more speed, these machines will be behind 2x separate home 1Gb/s (up and down) fiber... Another thing I had to consider was power since I plan to back these up with lead-acid batteries for power outages. These drives draw 2W when active... so that is 18W for 8x (512GB) DB drives and one OS drive! Compared to the 25/32W of the 8/16-core motherboards that's alot... but mechanical drives are insane on electricity, up to 10W per drive!!! But good point, do you know what connector tese use?
- wtallis 5y ago
  The Optane Memory drives use a M.2 connector, keyed for carrying two lanes of PCI Express 3.0, over which they use the NVMe protocol. If you're concerned about battery life, you really shouldn't be using lots of small drives, especially when the controllers are so ancient. You'll get at least 5x the performance per Watt from a single newer flash-based SSD and much better idle power behavior. Consumer SSDs also offer much more in the way of low-power idle states than enterprise SSDs. At the extreme, you can get a $75 512GB drive that provides significantly more performance than 8x X25-Es in aggregate, while never reaching 3W power draw under load and idling at under 10mW.
  - bullen 5y ago
    Sure but the 100.000 writes per bit!? To me data integrity and longevity are paramount! These have same idle power btw, but ofcourse 2W on read/write is bad but I rather use these $1000 in 2011 50nm SLC industrial drives and compress my database than buy some MLC/TLC/QLC drive made today with 14nm!
    - wtallis 5y ago
      You should be aware that SSDs perform wear leveling, so the key metric is not how many program/erase cycles the underlying flash can handle on a per-block basis, but the total amount of writes the drive can handle, usually expressed in TB or PB. Unless you have measured your own workload in enough detail to know otherwise, it is extremely unlikely you actually need to use SLC NAND. The market has almost completely abandoned SLC NAND for good reason, and your use case probably isn't that special (though if it is, I'm sure we could have an interesting conversation about it). Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that a modern TLC SSD could easily fulfill your actual write endurance and data retention requirements, because that's the conclusion that has been reached by all of the big corporations who have been using modern SSDs in production at scale.
      - bullen 5y ago
        Maybe, but I'm factoring in the time spent on maintenance at 100x the cost because that is not something I want me or my kids to have to do ever! Meaning with 5 million customers on my MMO we have 250 years of all of them playing every day with these drives. Which gives us margin!
      - gpapilion 5y ago
        The wildcard here is the garbage collection in the drive, and bad firmware with high write amplification. I’ve seen TLC devices go bad within a year where the vendor optimized for full page P/E cycles. That said these were high transaction server workloads, and typical home use would be challenged to get to that kind of wear.

boris 5y ago

In my experience the weak point here is the controller/firmware. We bought a bunch of high-endurance Enterprise MLC drives (also Intel but newer) and one of them has already bricked itself, way before reaching any kind of wear worth mentioning.

imtringued 5y ago
This is extremely common with old SSDs.
bullen 5y ago
Ok, so I will google firmware patches, thx!
- willis936 5y ago
  A firmware patch doesn't fix thermal runaway on a linear regulator. Don't trust media too much.
  - bullen 5y ago
    I plan to mount these vertically outside the case for optimal passive thermal cooling. I think these are not much worse off than todays drives when it comes to heat, maybe I should strip the 2.5" cases! Good point! Unless we have a EMP! ;) Edit: I found my M2 spacers I ordered by mistake 5 years ago, they are a bit wide at 18mm but that is good for thermals! Genious! Edit2: Ordered 6mm spacers! You can get an idea how it will look here: http://move.rupy.se/file/SSD_unit.png http://move.rupy.se/file/SSD_unit.png
    - willis936 5y ago
      Heat over time matters, but the thermal runaway scenario I referenced is the most common failure mechanism I know of in small electronics. It's just something that they do. It's not a matter of if, but when. More important than cooling is the voltage rails. Reliable PSUs that don't overvolt the load under any scenario are important.

michaelt 5y ago

> I don't think we'll ever see that kind of quality again. Some companies still make new "psuedo-SLC" drives [1] which store a single bit per flash cell. The downside is they're expensive: $1/gigabyte instead of $0.1/gigabyte. And at that price, RAID mirroring starts to look like a great deal! [1] https://uk.farnell.com/c/office-computer-networking-products/computer-products/drives/solid-state-ssd-drives?st=pslc https://uk.farnell.com/c/office-computer-networking-products...

bullen 5y ago
I got these drives at $0.6/GB... These drives seem to be built like tanks and they fill the 2.5" enclosure to the brim. They are also the first drive with RAM buffer on the read lane which is interesting in it's own right; meaning the motherboard never have to wait for writes but the disk have to wait for the motherboard on reads!!!

rkagerer 5y ago

I have several, similar X25-M's still in use over a decade, they are great drives.

bullen 5y ago
Good to hear, M are MLC I think so the X25-E should be even better!?