What are the frequently asked questions about SolidFire Drives?

Applies to

• SolidFire

Answer

1. How do I go about replacing a SolidFire Drive? 

• Contact SolidFire Technical Support.
• SolidFire will supply replacement drives upon any drive failure. It is recommended to have one spare drive per every five nodes. 

2. Can I be responsible for destroying my own failed drives under SolidFire's drive replacement policy? 

• Yes, however there is an additional cost that comes along with drive replacement. 

3. Does SolidFire do anything special to prevent premature wear and help drive endurance? 

• Yes - SolidFire works directly with SSD manufacturers to provide
  • write endurance internally 
  • sequentially writing the whole SSD 
  • performing periodic "Garbage Collection" to more evenly "wear" across the whole of the SSD.
• SolidFire's algorithm provides advances on top of manufacturer's wear leveling to exceed the typical manufacture's failure rates.

4. Does SolidFire allow for on-site spares of drives? 

• Yes - Customer must purchase onsite spares.

5. Can I use my own SSD drives within a SolidFire node/cluster? 

• No - SolidFire's architecture allows only for specific drive sizes and manufacturers.

6. How do I know how full a drive is?

• SolidFire's UI and API calls allow a user to poll a given drive for drive utilization. eg.) 

 https://192.168.0.101/json-rpc/10.0?method=GetDriveStats&driveID=37

This will display something like the following, 

{
id: null,
result: {
driveStats: {
driveID: 37,
failedDieCount: 0,
lifeRemainingPercent: 100,
lifetimeReadBytes: 1677084065792,
lifetimeWriteBytes: 1621115273216,
powerOnHours: 49307,
readBytes: 0,
readOps: 0,
reallocatedSectors: 0,
reserveCapacityPercent: 100,
timestamp: "2019-06-12T08:03:35.155099Z",
totalCapacity: 300069052416,
uncorrectableErrors: 0,
usedCapacity: 0,
usedMemory: 264261632,
writeBytes: 0,
writeOps: 0
}
}
}

7. Does SolidFire do predictive drive failure? 

• No - Given SolidFire's architecture, it is best to let a component fail completely versus trying to prevent the failure.

 

Additional Information

NA