Data Centre SSDs: No Power Loss Protection (PLP) Means No S2D Deployments

Reading this article on Serve The Home this morning: Kingston DC450R SSD Released SATA and 3.84TB Maximum.

The Kingston DC450R SSD is being released with “Data Center Series” on the sticker.

But, it does not have power loss protection (PLP) so how could this be?

The suspicion here is that it is because the drives are meant for static storage being heavily read optimized.

And yet, that does not protect data in-flight if there is a power loss event in the data centre. We’ve certainly heard and seen a number of these events across small and hyper-cloud vendors alike.

So, why? To save a few dollars?

We’re not sure, but let’s be absolutely clear on this: We would _never_ knowingly deploy any solid-state drives without PLP in any of our solutions.

This is especially true for our Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) Hyper-Converged and Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) cluster setups.

The underlying storage service would detect the lack of PLP and in an all-flash setting disable any cache abilities. Thus, using this type of non-PLP drive would suffer a significant performance hit for writes.

Remember, the data needs to get _in_ to the drives at some point. 😉

As always, it’s Buyer Beware.

Further Reading: Don’t do it: consumer-grade solid-state drives (SSD) in Storage Spaces Direct (Dan Lovinger)

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
www.s2d.rocks !
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