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?

>
> 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).


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada