SandForce "SF-22XX" issues and workarounds

[sergiu]

Incidentally, I've been wondering about SF 1 and 2. Since they don't have DRAM caches, they use nand on the drive. Maybe SFs aren't limited by the NAND endurance overall, but perhaps they keep wearing out the same NAND device from storing all the associated SF data. If it didn't adequately rotate where it stored all the data necessary to make SF work, maybe writing millions of files is more detrimental than just writes to NAND.

I guess SF data is specific to a number of pages (like keeping parity data for 8 pages in a separate and complete page) so it should not matter too much the number of files. Also, most probably pages are grouped so writing pattern should also not impact the usage. Sandforce advertise the fact that internal data is spread thru all dies for better redundancy. It might be very sad to find out that this is not true