NVMe Drives in the OpenMetal XL v5 Server

Q: What NVMe drives does OpenMetal use in the XL v5?

The XL v5 ships with four 6.4 TB Micron 7500 MAX U.3 NVMe SSDs for data (25.6 TB raw) plus two 960 GB NVMe drives in a RAID 1 mirror for the operating system — physically isolated from the data pool.

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The Micron 7500 MAX is built on Micron’s 232-layer 3D TLC NAND with a 6-plane independent wordline read architecture, connected via PCIe Gen4 1×4 with NVMe v2.0b. At the 6.4 TB capacity, the drive delivers 7,000 MB/s sequential read, 5,900 MB/s sequential write, 1,100,000 4K random read IOPS, 400,000 4K random write IOPS, and 650,000 IOPS at a mixed 70/30 workload. Typical read latency is 70 μs; typical write latency is 15 μs. QoS is sub-1ms at 99.9999% (six-nines) for 4K random reads up to QD128. These numbers come from the Micron 7500 Tech Prod Spec Rev. A 10/2023.

Endurance is rated at 3 Drive Writes Per Day (Mixed-Use) with 35,040 TBW (35.04 PBW) over a 5-year warranty — enough headroom for sustained OLTP, Ceph OSD, and ClickHouse workloads without endurance becoming a planning constraint. The drives are configured for boot/data isolation: a kernel panic, OS rebuild, or boot-drive failure cannot touch the data pool, and a data drive failure cannot stall the OS.

Per-server raw IOPS at the rated mix exceeds 2.6 million 4K random reads across the four data drives — enough headroom to make per-tenant noisy-neighbor problems disappear on dense Ceph OSD, large PostgreSQL primaries, or multi-tenant SaaS workloads. The 25.6 TB raw capacity is included in the fixed monthly price; AWS m7i.metal instances by contrast provide no included NVMe and require EBS purchased separately at additional per-GB and per-IOPS cost.

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