Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sn 1592 days ago
What I have done, and will continue to recommend, is to not have all identical SSDs in a RAID - they should be a mix of part number or age.
5 comments

This, so much. At a previous company, mixing manufacturers (not brands) was a policy: WD or Sandisk -> Hynix or Toshiba, etc.

Funny enough, this plays very well with RAID10: with each leg made of 2 different brands, a firmware failure will not affect you.

Which is the same advice given for disk-based RAID arrays. It is good advice and should be followed.

Just back sure they all use the same block size.

Sometimes that's a good idea, sometimes it might make things worse. A previous server that had a RAID-1 of SSDs was limited by SSD write speed. As the SSDs got old the write speed dropped significantly. If I had 2 servers that each had the same brand of SSDs then one server would need both SSDs replaced while if I had 2 servers with different brands then each server would need a single SSD replaced which would have been more hassle.
This is what lot numbers are for, the tracking (and in this case: leveraging) of variability between production runs. Spread multiple lots over more than one storage array and you're good to go.
Multiple lot numbers won't save you from firmware bugs.
Neither will brand diversification, where they can not only independently implement their own vision of what a data eating binary blob should look like - they can also converge onto a single controller source. Wanna run down that potential failure mode on a dozen different drives, or just one?
Isn't this the same advice with HDDs?