Is RAID necessary for Intel P3700 SSDs?

[JA4]

Is it necessary to RAID (mirror) Intel P3700s in a production setup or will a single drive be reliable enough?

[jbenavides]

Hello jesin,

A RAID level with data redundancy, such as RAID 1, is still required in order to prevent data loss and system downtime in case of drive failure.

The Intel® SSD DC P3700 Series is manufactured for high performance, reliability and endurance. It is designed to meet or exceed current standards for Data Center systems, however, it still may fail as any other computer component.

Even though the Intel® SSD DC P3700 may outperform other drives in Enterprise systems, only data redundancy (with RAID) can prevent data loss in case of unexpected failure.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-dc-p3700-spec.html Intel® SSD DC P3700 Series Specifications

[JA4]

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the details.

Rackspace offers a bare-metal server with 2 Seagate Nytro WarpDrive BLP4-1600 devices. They recommend http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/configure-flash-drives-in-high-io-instances-as-dat... configuring both of them in software RAID 0. So are these devices much more durable than the Intel P3700?

Also does configuring software RAID 1 bottleneck the performance the P3700s?

[jbenavides]

I am not able to refer to the Seagate drives, since they seem to use a different technology than the Intel® SSD DC P3700. The P3700 is a PCIe* Gen 3.0 x4 SSD with NVMe* technology.

We would like to remind you that by definition, RAID 0 does not provide data redundancy, so if a volume fails the whole RAID array will fail. According to RAID standards, RAID 1 will give you data redundancy and better read performance, but it may be slower to write than RAID 0, or a standalone drive configuration.

The P3700 can be used as a stand alone drive, or in RAID mode (software, or hardware).

The Intel® SSD DC P3700 is designed as a high-end Solid-State Drive for Data Center/Enterprise systems. If you wish to compare it to other devices, I advise you to check the Product Specifications document linked before, in page 16 you will find the reliability specifications, and in page 10 and 11 you can find the advertised performance.

[EVids]

Is hot plug supported with Intel P3700 DC NVME 2½" in Windows Server 2012 R2?

Two disks are set up in software raid in the OS using Intel drivers.

If not, is it possible to simulate drive failure to determine if the drive redundancy is working correctly?

What is the rebuilding procedure in case of drive failure?