RE: Opinions on dropping maintance on SSD drives after the 3 year warranty expires

Rob,

Looking back over the last 30 years, we probably had no more than 15 DASD failures. (2 in the last 6 years, 10 k spinny, no SSD failures as of yet)

Did you purchase any extra drives for the SSDs that went off warranty?
If not, if an SSD would fail, how would you obtain a replacement?

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rob Berendt
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 7:04 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Opinions on dropping maintance on SSD drives after the 3 year warranty expires

Our first gen SSD's back on Power 6 ended up losing a few right away. Yes, more than one.

We have three Power 8's, two of them are all SSD's. Boss wanted main ASP to be on maintenance but he wasn't going to pay that price. So we purchased the card expansion unit, two newer disk expansion units with newer SSD's. We migrated all of ASP1 to those drives. Then we removed the older drives from the ASP and created them as a secondary ASP for archive data for a project we had planned. The disks in the secondary ASP will be self maintained. Before we started RAID we created two drives for each of the two RAID sets as hot spares. Then we created the raid set with those hot spares in it. We did it that way so that we could use the two right hand drives as hot spares. Otherwise if you create the hot spares as part of the initial raid set it will pick the two left hand drives. It's just confusing to those of us who like the left hand drives to be where load source goes and stuff.

But, we had the disk to spare so we created both raid sets with two hot spares to make it easier for the self maintenance. And it's RAID 5.

We did this for both of our SSD based Power 8's.

The third Power 8 also has two ASP's. Both spinning disk. The second ASP is slower 10k huge drives. Again, for archive data.


Rob Berendt