HP announced one of the industry’s broadest line of 6G SAS Enterprise-quality Solid State Drives (SSDs). These drives have an HP unique feature—the HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge Utility. This intelligent tool monitors write endurance and informs customers at regular intervals on the wear out status of the their 6G SAS Enterprise SSD. With their high performance and reliability, these new drives help solve the fundamental challenge of database and high-transaction application performance by closing the gap between high-performing multi-core CPUs and the need for more hard drives that drive higher input/output operations per second (IOPS). Use these to gain a competitive advantage in database and high-transaction application opportunities.
| Enterprise Solid State Drives, warranty, and service coverage changes | |
| Solid State Drives (SSDs) have write limitations and once exceeded, they are no longer usable. Help customers get maximum usage of their SSDs and make them aware of changes to warranty service (that align with industry coverage limitations):
– HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge: Provides customer visibility to SSD remaining life. |
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| What’s the issue? Supporting Solid State Drives in the Enterprise is a challenge for the IT industry because of consumable properties of these devices. Solid State drives that have reached their write endurance limits are now regularly excluded from warranty and limitations have been placed on service coverage by several companies in the industry. Bottom line is that these drives have write limitations and once exceeded they are no longer useable. Useable life will vary and may depend on how much write activity is being performed. Technical Information: Why do SSDs have lifetime write limits? SSDs use NAND flash as their storage medium. NAND must erase before it can write. The combination of the erase and the program is called a program/erase cycle, or p/e cycle. Erasing and programming a NAND flash cell results in physical damage to the oxide layer separating the floating gate from the substrate. Therefore, NAND media is consumed over time by write activity. NAND flash devices can perform a finite number of p/e cycles. What has changed? In order to monitor the drive to see if it is approaching its writeable end of life, HP has new tools that can monitor a drive’s write usage. HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge™ release: HP’s newest Enterprise SSD drives support the HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge™ allowing visibility to percentage of life consumed (percent endurance used); life remaining, given the workload to date; drive is at or near end of its useful life. SMARTSSD Wear Gauge will be used for: • Initial customer technology/product evaluation to determine whether solution would meet targeted service life under targeted workloads • Runtime monitoring • Warranty entitlement decision – did SSD fail or wear out? SMARTSSD Wear Gauge™ has rolled out and available for many HP Enterprise SSD drives. PCIe drives are not in scope for the SMARTSSD Wear Gauge™ at this time but do have their own tools for analyzing write usage status. For more information, contact your regional marketing representative. Service Coverage: HP Enterprise Storage and Server SSD drives will carry one or both of the following support limitations, depending on how coverage is obtained, i.e., device level coverage or enclosure level coverage. |
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