Related Procedures For Installing, Removing, And Replacing Disk Drives Or Solid-State Drives; Internal Drive Sharing; Mainstream Solid-State Drives - IBM Power System 9040-MR9 Manual

Related procedures for installing, removing, and replacing disk drives or
solid-state drives
Find procedures that are related to installing, removing, and replacing disk drives or solid-state drives in
an 9040-MR9 system.
Internal drive sharing on a 9040-MR9 system
Learn how to split the internal drives in the system into groups, which you can manage separately.
Before you begin
Two PCIe3 x8 SAS RAID internal adapters, quad-port 6 Gb (FC EJ0K; CCIN 57B4) are used to split the
disk drive backplane in the 9040-MR9 system. The eight short-form factor (SFF) disks can be split into
two sets of 4 SFF drives. The drives can be configured for RAID 0, 10, 5, and 6.
For more information about the SAS Subsystem, see SAS subsystem.
For more information about the FC EJ0K adapter, see PCIe3 RAID SAS quad-port 6 Gb adapter (FC EJ0K;
CCIN 57B4)
For more information about installing FC EJ0K, see Installing PCIe adapters in the system.
The split disk drive mode can be useful for partitioning. If you are setting up two distinct logical partitions
(LPARs), the resources that are associated with FC EJ0K can be assigned to two distinct partitions. To
learn about a partitioned environment, see Logical partitioning.

Mainstream solid-state drives

Learn about the differences between enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) and mainstream SSDs
(previously called read intensive SSDs).
Traditionally, enterprise SSDs are built on high-endurance multi-level cell (MLC) flash and can handle up
to 10 drive writes per day. These SSDs are referred to as enterprise SSDs in this document (previously
called eMLC). Now, because of software advances and industry demands, less write intensive SSDs can
be used with applications where write operations are less frequent. IBM offers several 4 K mainstream
SSDs, including feature codes (FCs) ES8Y, ES8Z, ES96, ES97, ESE7, ESE8, ES83, ES84, ES92, ES93, ESE1,
and ESE2.
Differences between mainstream and enterprise SSDs
Mainstream SSDs are less expensive to use, but also have lower endurance and random write
performance.
Lower endurance for mainstream drives
The NAND flash used in mainstream drives tend to be of lower endurance than the NAND flash used in
SSDs that are targeted for more write intensive workloads. Therefore, the number of write operations to a
mainstream drive is limited (typically, one drive write per day (DWPD) versus 10 DWPD on an enterprise
drive).
A drive write per day writes the entire capacity of the drive in 24 hours. For example, a DWPD for a 387 GB
drive writes 387 GB of data on the drive in 24 hours. You can write more data in a day, but the DWPD is
the average usage rate by which the life span of the drive is calculated. Since many applications require
only about 1 DWPD, these drives are the most commonly used drives in the industry and thus used for
mainstream applications. Only applications that require high endurance or the highest random write
performance need enterprise drives.
Lower over-provisioning for mainstream drives
SSDs have more NAND flash capacity than the rated user capacity of the drive. This extra capacity, called
over-provisioning, is used by the SSD controller during the operation of the drive. When more over-
provisioning is available, the controller extends the life of the flash more effectively. NAND flash can be
40 Power Systems: Disk drives or solid-state drives