NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is a compelling choice over traditional network storage protocols like NFS or SMB because you can leverage the raw performance of NVMe, including low latency overhead, scalability, low CPU overhead, and flexibility from on filesystems. For NVMe-oF with RDMA or Fibrechannel, you need specific networking gear,

Understanding WAF: The Key to Mastering SSD Performance As I mentioned in [this post], WAF is the most crucial topic to understand to master how SSDs work, and get the most out of your drives. Write amplification (henceforth just WAF) can happen at different levels of the software stack. For

Test Procedure for SSD Performance Measurement If you are just doing some quick benchmarking or just getting started with FIO, check out the [FIO Basics post]. Have you ever wondered how the spec sheet performance numbers are measured on an enterprise or data center SSD? Want to make totally awesome

Fio (flexible io tester) is what the pros and storage industry insiders use to benchmark drives in Linux. Fio is insanely powerful, confusing, and detailed; it can perform just about any sort of io generation one can think of. I’m going to give a few quick examples of how

This was originally written for the Chia blog here. Summary/TL;DR HDDs (hard disk drives) have moving parts and are subject to failure from mechanical wear and tear through regular use, and external environmental factors like temperature. Use SMART to monitor the drive’s health to look for uncorrectable

Storage Durability Calculator Number of data shards Number of parity shards Annual failure rate (in %) Rebuild time (in hours) Total number of objects Calculate Durability

When new interns came into our group at Intel in the non-volatile memory solutions group (NSG), the first thing I would do is take them to a whiteboard and explain how SSDs work, the first concept being WAF. WAF (Write Amplification Factor) is arguably the most critical concept in SSDs,