Solid-State-Drives are becoming widely implemented in ESXi hosts for caching (vFlash Read Cache, PernixData FVP), Virtual SAN or plain Datastores. Unfortunately, SSDs have limited lifetime per cell. Its value may range from 1.000 times in consumer TLC SSDs up to 100.000 times in enterprise SLC based SSDs. Lifetime can be estimated by device TBW parameters provided by vendor in its specification, It describes how many Terabytes can be written to the entire device, until the warranty expires.

SanDisk is one of few companies currently offering 1TB of storage in a single-sided M.2 card – its product X400 SSD. X400 also comes in a 2.5″ 7mm-height form factor, but the M.2 configuration is the main selling point of this line. 1TB M.2 X400 card allows getting the most out of the ultra-thin notebooks in terms of storage, without sacrificing performance or battery life.

Seagate has announced the release of so-called “the world’s fastest SSD” with the significant performance differential between it and the next closest competitive device. The new SSD is compatible with the Open Compute Project specification, employs NVMe protocol, and is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots, which is 4GB/sec faster than the next fast competing solution.

New Integrity MC990 X is the first server in a line conforming to the new naming convention, with ‘MC’ standing for ‘mission critical’ and ‘X’ standing for ‘Xeon’.It replaces the Proliant DL980 (‘DL’ – ‘density line’). The name changes are implemented in order to meet specific customer needs, e.g., high performance and cloud computing. HP will keep the Proliant name for low-end and mid-range servers, and also keep the BL (blade) designation.

The post describes the history of RAID 5 and how it became obsolete at some point in time, just because HDD capacity grew at an enormous rate. It happened due to the chance of failure that grew to literal imminence when spinning disks reached TB scale, because the reading speed still had the same physical limits. Basically, creating a RAID 5 even with 1 TB disks would mean certain failure of the whole array and quite soon. The array technology was “saved” by an unlikely ally – the SSD. Being faster than hard disk drives in everything, they almost nullify the chance of the abovementioned failures. The post is written for everyday reader, not just engineers, and is quite comprehensive even without special knowledge and skills.