Is there a way to use Solid State Drives in the DL2100?

[Aaron_Lawson]

Hello all,
So, I understand that the WD DL2100 is not compatible with 7200 RPM Drives or so it says in its product compatibility information. Has anyone tried using 7200 RPM drives? If so what was the outcome?

I would much prefer to use the new SSDs coming out first quarter 2016. Consumer SSDs will be at the 4TB level and reasonably priced. Is there a way to swap the hard drives for an SSD? Any mounting for an SSD that is confirmed to fit in WD DL Series bays? I imagine the Intel Atom processor could make amazing use of an SSD oppose to a platter based HDD.

Last question. Does anyone in the WD community know if Western Digital is going to join the Solid State Drive market any time soon? I’m interested to see what they would come up with since they are the leader in HDDs at the moment.

Thats all folks, any information to help figure this out would be awesome. Ive searched everywhere and came up with no answers so far.

Thank you!

[Gramps]

don’t know about the speeds, I just use wd red’s. Icey Dock makes adapters. WD has been venturing into the SSD market. They currently ship the black squared dual drive which is 120gb ssd and 1tb platter

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=e5f16023-3969-4cd0-bc3b-fe7e35572518

[Myron]

SSD’s need special treatment by the operating system.

[Gramps]

Windows has no problems with SSD’s ?

[Aaron_Lawson]

Windows doesn’t have issues with SSDs. I wanted to know if there was a way to use them in a NAS. The primary reason I asked about the spindle speed is because I wanted to at least upgrade to the WD Red Pro 6TB HDDs.

The issue is im worried about it not working because of the stated compatibility…
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1440#Tab2&Tab9
It says at the top
“7200rpm drives and 10,000rpm drives are not supported.”
I am new to the DL2100, just got it yesterday and it works great. But of course, if I can get a little bit more speed out of it by upgrading the disks later then that would be cool as well.

The WD Red Pro is a 7,200 RPM drive with some nice features that bump up performance and reliability quite a bit. I actually have one of the black squared drives, Im mostly interested in what they are going to do about full NAND SSDs.

Thanks for the responses thus far guys!

[Aaron_Lawson]

Also, any idea about SSD compatibility with the DL2100 and DL4100? I looked up the Icey Dock adapters you posted. It looks like they would work amazing! Thanks for that!

[Myron]

The problem is how SSDs handle deleted data. Allocated blocks, I think, are not released for re-use and some utility hasto use the TRIM function of the SSD to tell it to do a clean-up. Some SSDs may do this automatically, some need something special.

I have a feeling WD;s offering of Linux on the NASs won’t support this.

Windows 10 gets round this using its defrag utility. It does not actually do a defrag of an SSD. It just tells the SSDs firmware to do a clean-up and release blocks for reuse.

So, I think with the current WD NASs you might run into issues,

[Aaron_Lawson]

Yeah that could be an issue. Some SSDs have a similar function embedded in the drive itself…i have to look it up. I wish there was a definitive resource by WD to get this 100% figured out. I have two Linux PCs with SSDs and have not run into any kind of issue of the sort…

Im sure the build off the Linux kernel for the NAS is a little different…it would be nice to find someone who has tested this or a response from a WD rep, something.

Im pretty sure most SSDs manage this with the controller, Sandforce controllers do at least. Also the MEX controller and pretty much any Samsung SSD does the garbage collection task without the OS needing to command it to. At least from what I understand…so with those SSDs is there any other reason why there would be an issue?

[Myron]

A good write-up on this on Wikipedia:

Trim (computing)

I think the WD NASs are not currently capable to asking any SSDs to periodically do their housekeeping.

[Aaron_Lawson]

Ask Ars: “My SSD does garbage collection, so I don’t need TRIM… right?”

Check this out. According to this there really shouldn’t be an issue using the SSD with the NAS because of how the controller works in modern SSDs. The deletion of a file is generally the same method, a command sent, regardless of by what, to the disk to erase blocks. Unless im understanding something wrong…i dunno.

[Myron]

@Aaron_Lawson, I think this is the key bit: “With TRIM, an SSD is no longer forced to save pages belonging to deleted files. TRIM doesn’t obviate the need for garbage collection—it works with garbage collection to more properly mark pages as stale. And you don’t need TRIM for garbage collection to work—but TRIM makes an SSD’s garbage collection more efficient.”

The NAS can erase data by marking in it’s file system that a cluster is now unused, but the SSD will still think that the data it’s keeping hold of is still valid. the Linux OS in the NAS will also have to tell the SSD to mark the pages that make-up a erased cluster as stale.

So, there is still a need for the operating system to tell the SSD what data is no-longer needed as opposed to a mechanical hard drive where data can simply be overwritten.

[Aaron_Lawson]

I see. Well, Im hoping an update in the future would support TRIM. Thanks for your reply. Im not quite sure why there aren’t a lot of SSD NAS available yet, i have only found a handful…

[Gramps]

a NAS is typically for mass storage and SSD’s are too pricey for that
The OS on the DL is in memory anyway so the nic would probably be the bottle neck

[Myron]

Maybe because there is not that much of a access time problem for a server and it’s friggin’ expensive to populate a RAID array with a lot of storage! Also, the NASs operating system has to be able to tell the SSD what pages it’s finished with otherwise this garbage collection on in SSD will just ended up moving erased data about from one place to the other.

Until I suggest that no-one tries to shove an SSD in a NAS. Just use the normal drives.

I guess without TRIM support on the OS within the NAS what would happen is that even though the operating system will show there is plenty of space, very quickly the SSDs used in a OS that’s not aware of SSD aware, the SSD drives will quickly slow down as there will be more garbage collection than data transfer and finally the SSD will run out of space.

I’ve noticed on Windows 10 when defrag is run on an SSD, all it does is a TRIM operation and and it’s very quick to in telling the SSD what pages are not longer required. Just takes a few seconds.

[Aaron_Lawson]

Did anyone have a chance to close the loop on whether or not the WD Red Pro drives or the WD Se drives work in the DL2100 NAS?