SSD Wear Status "Not Supported"

[rebus9]

Have ProLiant DL160 Gen8 servers with the P420 controller.  As an experiment, I mounted some cheap consumer grade Samsung 840 EVO SSDs into 3rd party carriers and everything worked great.  LEDs worked.  Smart Storage Administrator displayed the wear status (percentage of life remaining).  Everything worked perfectly, just like genuine HP parts.

Then I pulled the junky EVOs and put in some 850 PROs.  But then, the Smart Storage Admin showed wear status "not supported".

OK, so I removed the 850 PROs and put in Samsung Enterprise SM863s.  Still, wear status shows "not supported".

Does anyone know WHY the Smart Storage Admin console happily displayed wear status on the cheap-junk 840 EVO.... but not on the more expensive 850 PRO or even the much more expensive SM863 Enterprise SSDs?

I am VERY hesitant to put a machine in production without being able to monitor SSD wear, but I'm also NOT going to pay HP's horribly obscene prices for SSDs.... not when Samsung makes a highly durable Enterprise class SSD.

Your thoughts?

[rebus9]

Wow... what happened to the HP forums?  Since they split the server forums from the old site to the HPE.com site, seems like most of the traffic disappeared.

Anyone seeing the wear status problem on ANY brand of SSDs?  I'm having a hard time believing the newest Enterprise class SSDs from Samsung (SM863) don't support wear indicators, while the super-cheap older model (840 EVO) does support it.  

Did Samsung change how it's done and HP firmware hasn't caught up?  Or is there some black magic going on to force us to buy HP branded SSDs?

[DrLexaero]

I have the same status, but I bought real HP SSD! Can anyone help me with this?

[rebus9]

Seriously?  A genuine HP branded SSD gives "not supported" for wear status?  

Was this a previous generation SSD that you mounted in a Gen8 carrier, or did it come from HP in a Gen8 carrier and sold specificly for the Gen8 server?

[redefy]

Hi,

Did you ever find a solution to this? I'm having the same problem with my 850 Pro Evo's

[rebus9]

No.  I posted this question in several tech forums, but no useable answers.

[Timau]

Intel 535 SSD drives dont work either...

If there is a solution it would be great to hear back from anyone

[rebus9]

Update, 11 months after my original post.  No answers.  Posted the same question on several forums but nobody can say why wear status won't display.  HP won't say anything except they will only answer support questions about their own HP SSDs.   Samsung 840 EVO happily displays wear status, but not the 850 Pro or SM863 Enterprise.  I'm running all the latest HP BIOS and controller firmware.  So far life has been great with the 850 Pro and SM863 in production in very busy application servers.  But because I cannot monitor wear, I heavily overprovisioned all drives, including the SM863 Enterprise (which comes from the factory with overprovisioning built in).  I don't like wasting that much capacity, but better safe than sorry.   It's still a LOT cheaper to buy extra drives and overprovision heavily than to buy HP branded SSDs-- which are nothing more than rebranded parts from 3rd party manufacturers like Samsung or Intel.

The Samsung SM863 Enterprise 960 GB is (at the time of this post) $560.  HP's 800 GB SSD (part# 653964-001) is $2500-3000+ depending on vendor, and some sites list it for more than $4000.   That's a ridiculouly absurd markup.  C'mon, HP!!!

[trcosta]

I don't know if you guys have solved your question, but I am facing this 'issue' now because I am new in server administration, but I can see this information about TBW to SSDs at the Array Diagnostic Utility. For example, in HPE SSA GUI you go to 'server' -> 'diagnostic' -> and you select the first report that is the Array Diagnostic Utility, and in that report you have "Workload Information" of the physical drives that show a little information that do the job. You can use HPE SSA CLI and type 'ctrl slot=0 diag file=c:\diag.zip' and extract that zip, get the xml and do all this with powershell to read these statistics with zabbix agent and configure your alerts/alarms such a way that you can be warned when a drive is reaching its tbw limit defined by the manufacturer.

Sorry for my english.