6

We are about to order a dell R610 with a H700. We were thinking of using 2 X Samsung 850 Pro 512Gb drives in RAID 1.

The question is does the Perc H700 support TRIM in hardware RAID 1? The answers I have found from googling around seem to indicate no, but this also seems to be a fast moving field, and there have been firmware updates since then.

Ohh and it seems non-dell certified drives will no longer be blocked

Or, if there is no hardware supported TRIM for RAID 1 on the H700 with the latest firmware, then would it be better to get SSD's which have inbuilt TRIM based on sandforce controllers? Eg the Kingston HyperX which seems to have done reasonably well in the endurance tests

The Samsung 850's have better stats than the HyperX drives, but I am lead to believe would have degraded performance without TRIM commands being issued to them...

Thus does the PERC H700 support TRIM, if not then is there another Hardware RAID controller that does, if not is the best bet using sandforce controlled SSDs?

Thanks, Jas

ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799
sysjas
  • 193
  • 2
  • 4
  • 15
  • Just because they arent blocked doesnt mean its a good idea. I would not expect to get any support on this server while those drives are installed. – Grant Dec 21 '14 at 15:01
  • You can get support on the server just fine. It's just a bad drive choice because there are better options. – ewwhite Dec 21 '14 at 15:36
  • Well what is a good drive choice then? It looked quite good to me from the statistics and from what I read. If not the Samsung 850 Pro, then what about an Intel 730 SSD since it seems to be very similar to the [Intel S3500](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7803/intel-ssd-730-480gb-review) – sysjas Dec 21 '14 at 16:23

1 Answers1

6

Well, doesn't the SSD choice depend a bit on your anticipated workload?

Really: Are SSD drives as reliable as mechanical drives (2013)?

But generically, you can attach just about anything to an LSI (Perc) controller and make it work. Should you? I mean, these are still consumer disks...

There's no TRIM support on the hardware RAID controller (it's not common). It's also not that important. You can just under-provision the drives. Create a Virtual Disk smaller than the capacity of the SSDs; e.g. don't allocation all of the space to the disks.

enter image description here

Community
  • 1
ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799
  • Thanks. I have been reading a little bit more on this as well... It looks like with sufficient over-provisioning the drive will [still work well over time](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era/7). The question is now how do I over-provision these drives? Is something like using [hdparm](http://serverfault.com/questions/276084/how-to-over-provision-an-intel-ssd-raid-array-via-the-dell-h700-perc-raid-contro) going to work? – sysjas Dec 21 '14 at 14:01
  • 1
    *"Create a Virtual Disk smaller than the capacity of the SSDs"* - Don't make the virtual disk the full side of the SSDs. – ewwhite Dec 21 '14 at 14:05
  • Ok. I had read that as well... I also read something about not initialising the whole drive using some certain software because the initialisation will test the drive by writing to every sector so that the drive thinks it is totally occupied or something like that. I can't seem to find the link again though... – sysjas Dec 21 '14 at 16:16
  • Your "link" would only apply when the drive is connected to a standard SATA port. Since you're using a hardware RAID controller, creating a virtual disk smaller than the capacity of the drive is the equivalent. – longneck Dec 23 '14 at 03:26
  • Also, no modern formatting tool actually writes to the entire drive. – longneck Dec 23 '14 at 03:27
  • @longneck, Thanks! That was the exact information I was looking for, thus I gather the H700 firmware which at the time of writing was updated in [Jun 2013](http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=YDWP6) would definitely fall into this "modern" camp. Thanks! – sysjas Dec 23 '14 at 11:46