On 02/12/2017 08:34 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 10:07:01PM -0800, ToddAndMargo wrote:
>> Any of your guys use M.2 drives?
>> Any trouble getting SL7 to boot off them?
>>
> Yes, we use Kingston (Toshiba) 120GB M.2 SATA SSDs as boot disks. On older machines
> we use Kingston SV300 plain SATA SSDs.
>
> No special problems to report. 0 failures. SMART attributes make sense.
>
> (Generally, Kingston (Toshiba) SSDs have good reliability,
> out of two pagesful of SSDs, in almost 5 years only 2 failures,
> the very first SSD (SV100) bricked by firmware update, one SV300 turned
> into a space heater (if powered, heats to more than 50 degC, does not work,
> internal short in the controller chip. by luck no flames, no fire).
>
>> Do you use them in RAID One at all?
>>
> Yes, we have many pairs of SVP200 and SV300 SSDs in RAID1 (linux mdadm).
> One pair is ZFS RAID1.
>
> Why asking? Do you expect linux mdadm raid1 malfunction on SSDs?

Hi Konstantin,

I am asking as several motherboards I have looked at only
have one M.2 slot and raid would need two.

I may be misunderstanding here, but I think that if
you need two drives, you need a PCIe carrier to
put them into instead of the M.2 slot.

Maybe I misunderstand for the M.2 slot works.

>
>> Do you have a favorite PCIe 16x carrier?
>>
> Socket M.2 M-key is PCIe x4 (or SATA). So this is 4x M.2 carrier? I got some free
> M.2 carriers (dual M.2, I think) with some ASUS motherboards.
>
> But I cannot use them, as we only have SATA SSDs due to excessive cost of PCIe SSDs.
>
> Our typical machine configuration is 120GB SSD for system partition, pair
> of 6 or 8TB HDDs for home and data storage (mdadm raid1). A nightly cron job
> to rsync backup the SSD contents. (still worried about SSDs bricking themselves).
>
>

Thank you!

-- 
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Computers are like air conditioners.
They malfunction when you open windows
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