Is the S3700 800GB suitable for RAID6 for our main storage unit for our servers for 500 users?

[TBorn1]

Our consultants say that the flash cells of MLC SSDs wear out too fast for this application, citing 3000 program-erase cycles. To my knowledge enterprise multi-level cells like in the Intel s3700 should last 10.000 to 30.000 cycles. If you do a simplified calculation for 10 disk writes per day for 5 years then you get 10 x 365 x 5 = 18250 cycles. Ok there is no over provisioning or write amplification included in this simplified calculation.

One of the other statements was that when one disk in the array fails, additional load could easily wear out the remaining disks early. Since the data for the missing disk is just calculated from the parity information I do not see this point.

Has anybody deployed the s3700 in heavy load application for several months?

Best regards

Thomas

[Jose_H_Intel1]

Hello Thomas,

You may want to consider the possibility that the RAID controller may not be capable of providing the TRIM command to the drives and therefore you may need to schedule some down time for optimization on each drive depending on the write operations performed.

[TBorn1]

Hello,

thanks for the Information. Can I use the Intel SSD Datacenter Tool for this purpose?

[Jose_H_Intel1]

Unfortunately it will not work since the Intel® SSD Datacenter Tool is designed for the Intel® SSD 910 Series which communicates via PCI Express. "The Intel SSD Data Center Tool does not support any other Intel SSDs."

[TBorn1]

OK.

Last question: is there anything that would suggest not using the s3700 in a RAID6 in an enterprise deployment?