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HP D2700 enclosure and SSDs. Will any SSD work?



I've got an HP D2700 enclosure that I'm looking to shove some 2.5" SSD drives in. Looking at the prices of HP's SSD drives vs something like an Intel 710 and even something less 'enterprisey', there's quite a difference in price.



I know the HP SSD's will obviously work, but I've heard rumours that buying an Intel/Crucial/whatever SATA SSD, bunging it in an HP 2.5" caddy and putting it in a D2700 won't work.



Is there an enclosure / disk compatibility issue I should watch out for here?



On the one hand, they're all just SATA devices, so the enclosure should treat them all the same. On the other, I'm not particularly well-versed in the various different SSD flavours to know whether there's a good technical reason why one type of drive would work, yet another one wouldn't. I can also imagine that HP are annoying enough to do firmware checks on any disks and have the controller reject those it doesn't like.




For background, the D2700 already has 12x 300GB 10k SAS drives in it, and I was planning on getting 8x 500GB (or thereabouts) SSDs to create another zpool. Whole thing is connected to an HP X1600 running Solaris 11.


Answer



Well, I use a D2700 for ZFS storage and worked a bit to get LEDs and sesctl features to work on it. I also have SAS MPxIO multipath running well.



I've done quite a bit of SSD testing on ZFS and with this enclosure.



Here's the lowdown.




  • The D2700 is a perfectly-fine JBOD for ZFS.


  • You will want to have an HP Smart Array controller handy to update the enclosure firmware to the latest revision.

  • LSI controllers are recommended here. I use a pair of LSI 9205-8e for this.

  • I have a pile of HP drive caddies and have tested Intel, OCZ, OWC (sandforce), HP (Sandisk/Pliant), Pliant, STEC and Seagate SAS and SATA SSDs for ZFS use.

  • I would reserve the D2700 for dual-ported 6G disks, assuming you will use multipathing. If not, you're possibly taking a bandwidth hit due to the oversubscription of the SAS link to the host.

  • I tend to leave the SSDs meant for ZIL and L2arc inside of the storage head. Coupled with an LSI 9211-8i, it seems safer.

  • The Intel and Sandforce-based SATA SSDs were fine in the chassis. No temperature probe issues or anything.

  • The HP SAS SSDs (Sandisk/Pliant) require a deep queue that ZFS really can't take advantage of. They are not good pool or cache disks.

  • STEC is great with LSI controllers and ZFS... except for price... They are also incompatible with Smart Array P410 controllers. Weird. I have an open ticket with STEC for that.




Which controllers are you using? I probably have detailed data for the combination you have.


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