energy-SSD

We last discussed SK hynix back in August as we looked into the history of the company and overviewed their Enterprise SSD solutions. Today we are reviewing and looking at the performance of the SK hynix Enterprise SSD the PE6011. The PE6011 features a U.2 7mm form factor, 3D TLC NAND, PCIe NVMe interface, and capacities up to 7.68 TB. It is ideal for read-intensive workloads and light write usage. What’s unique about this product is that from conceptualization to manufacturing everything is done in-house by SK hynix. This product is aimed at those looking for an economical PCIe solution for the datacenter environment. Looking at the design and build of this drive, the entirety of the casing is a polished silver. It is a 2.5″ drive with a U.2 connector and a form factor z-height of 7mm. Being 7mm lends a physically smaller footprint and gives this drive the ability to be equipped and fit in a large variety of things for universal appeal. Branding as well as unique identifying informa...

NVMe flash storage has taken the industry by storm, establishing itself as the defacto standard when high-performance, low-latency storage is the requirement. There are times however when NVMe may be overkill, or cases where a hybrid flash approach makes more sense. Many server-based software defined solutions that take advantage of flash can do so in a multi-tier capability. VMware vSAN and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI are perhaps the most well known in this way; both can leverage a small high-performance flash pool for tiering, and less expensive SSDs for capacity. Buffeting lower cost SATA SSDs with a small count of NVMe provides an excellent blend of performance, capacity and cost. Another factor when considering the deployment of flash is the server itself. While there are plenty of all-NVMe servers from vendors both large and small, often times it’s impractical or unnecessary to go this route. With NVMe drive cost being higher than SATA, a majority of servers being sold today will...

The NVMe interface, specifically PCIe 3.0 NVMe 1.3, has been the preferable SSD interface for virtually any use case for a while now. This interface has been used time and again as vendors continue to improve in performance with each new generation. PCIe has now entered into 4.0, bringing with it massive gains in sequential and random performance. The KIOXIA CD6 is the latest SSD to hit the market (and one of the first PCIe 4.0 for enterprise), focusing on consistent performance in demanding 24×7 environments. This makes it ideal for data-centers with mixed-use and read-intensive endurance needs. The KIOXIA CD6 SSDs are also SFF-TA-1001 conformant, which allow for connectivity with SAS, SATA and NVMe drives on the same backplane (as well as Tri-mode controllers). The KIOXIA line features capacities ranging from 800GB to 15.36TB and are available in several different security and endurance options. The CD6 also comes in 2.5-inch, 15mm Z-height form factors and is powered by KIOXIA’s pro...

The Kingston DC1000B is a read-focused M.2 NVMe SSD aimed at the market of on-board server boot drives. While the DC1000B is aimed at being a cost effective offering, it doesn’t skimp on features such as power-fail protection that buyers expect from enterprise-grade SSDs. Aside from being used as a boot SSD, the DC1000B is beefy enough and can be leveraged for caching and logging applications as well, with a 0.5 DWPD endurance rating and a 5 year warranty. The DC1000B ships in capacities of 240GB and 480GB. The DC1000B leverages 3D TLC NAND and the PCIe Gen3 x 4 NVMe interface to offer sequential read speeds topping 3.2GB/s. According to Kingston, the drive can hit up to 205K IOPS in 4K steady-state read at an average latency of 161?s. On the write side of performance, things are a bit lower, but this is expected. Top sequential write speed is 565MB/s, top steady-state 4K is 20K IOPS, and latency is only 75?s. In other highlights, the drive supports SED with AES 256-bit encryption. ...

We’ve seen numerous enterprise SSDs from Memblaze over the years, they’re often on the leading edge when it comes to both technology and performance. Recently they’ve launched a new set of SSDs in the Memblaze PBlaze5 family, the Memblaze PBlaze5 920 Series. The 916 Series before it, the PBlaze5 920 Series comes in U.2 and Add-in-Card (AIC) form factors. The biggest difference with the 920 Series is that it uses a new set of NAND, moving to 96-layer 3D TLC NAND from 64-layer in the prior model. At the top end, the new Memblaze SSDs are quoted to deliver 5.9GB/s and 970,000 IOPS at the top end of the performance spectrum. Memblaze PBlaze5 920 926 The 920 Series comes in two endurance ratings, either 1 drive write per day (DWPD) or 3 DWPD. This creates four distinct drives, segmented on form factor and endurance. The AIC form factors are designated as C920 and C926, with the C920 being the more read the centric drive and the C926 carrying that 3 DWPD endurance rating. Similarly, the U....

Announced recently, the Seagate IronWolf 510 SSD is an M.2 PCIe NVMe drive designed specifically for NAS devices. More specifically, the IronWolf 510 will be leveraged for SSD caching in NAS devices, improving overall performance. The new SSD is designed for NAS use the same way the Seagate IronWolf 110 is, more endurance and the right performance for caching needs. Seagate IronWolf 510 SSD A vast majority of NAS device, particularly the desktop/tower type, leverage HDDs for their capacity. Since most support 16TB HDDs now, that is a ton of capacity, even in the smaller form factors. However, there is a limit on performance because of this. Several popular brands support SSD caching. This caching means you either give up two bays for 2.5” SSDs, or in the newer devices, slot in a couple of M.2 SSDs for the same experience. This last use case is where the Seagate IronWolf 510 slides in. We have a video overview here: Seagate states that the IronWolf 510 is built for NAS for a few...

NVMe SSDs have taken over as the top performers across the board. They started off by making huge leaps and bounds over SAS and SATA drives, but in recent years have slowly been eking out a little more performance with each iteration. There is an upper limit with PCIe 3.0 and the current drives are hitting them. But now with the second-generation  AMD EPYC 7002 CPUs , PCIe 4.0 is here, and KIOXIA is leveraging it with the CM6 SSDs. KIOXIA announced the new PCIe 4.0 drives, CM6 and CD6, as a demo back at the last Flash Memory Summit, back in the long-forgotten times of physical events. At the time, they were the first PCIe 4.0 SSDs and as of this writing, the CM6 SSD series may still be one of the few if only PCIe 4.0 SSDs for the enterprise. The big deal with the new drives is going to be higher performance: quoted as hitting up to 6.9GB/s and 1.4 million IOPS read. Those are some impressive theoretical numbers. The drives also come with in-band NVMe- MI, persistent event log and ...