In September HP has begun shipping of the second generation Solid State Drives for HP Proliant servers. In the past year since first introduction of SSD in HP servers, there appeared several solutions to shortcomings of the SSD technology.
The first flaw – per gigabyte price of solid state drives today is much higher than that of traditional hard drives. This disease can be treated only one way – increasing production volume and information density on each disk. And we went this way: now you have opportunity to install 60 GB and 120 GB disks.
The second nowadays drawback of SSD – it has lower maximum number of read/write cycles than magnetic hard drives have. It can strongly affect system which intensively works with data processing. In order to resolve this problem and delay degradation of SSD manufacturers implement special algorithms on microcode level for load balancing of the physical memory cells. It is also recommended to buy SSDs with redundant capacity and use it mostly for tasks requiring data reading (financial data real-time analysis, CAD, 3D modeling, etc.).
Adhering to these recommendation HP also switched to 3-Gbit SATA interface. This, in addition to a significant data read/write rate increasing, allows to use hot swap disks. Now HP’s servers with SSD can be applied in mission-critical applications without fear of data loss.
The new drives are available in the standard HP ProLiant Universal Drive Carrier (UDC) shell, 2.5 or 3.5-inch form factor, so they can be applied not only in blade servers, but in most other models HP ProLiant G6 and G5, supporting UDC, as well as in some models of HP Integrity.
HP ProLiant G5
Actual manufacturer of SSD is Samsung Electronics, but as HP sends it in market under its own brand, HP’s engineers had been thoroughly testing all electronics for several months. Therefore today the reliability of Solid State Drives is near high-speed SAS disks. At the same time SSDs have unique advantages, which provide greater scope in terms of using environment: extended operating temperature range (0-60° C instead of the usual 10-35° C), lower heat production and excellent resistance to shock and vibration.
