SSD Types

Datacenter SSD: maxRAID is designed for datacenter-class, TLC, 1 DWPD SSDs. These drives serve as our baseline for calculating drive wear and capacity.

SSD Interfaces: maxRAID works with any SSD interface—including SATA, SAS, NVMe, and fabric targets like iSCSI and NVMe-OF. Most users choose local solutions for optimal value and performance.

High-Endurance SSDs: There are two types of high-end SSDs. One variant offers more over-provisioning, which reduces the benefits when used with maxRAID. The other features higher-end flash and delivers the full benefits of maxRAID.

QLC Data Center SSDs: These SSDs perform well with maxRAID. Although they come with some QLC limitations, maxRAID helps mitigate performance and wear issues.

SSDs with a Large Indirection Unit: Some newer, larger SSDs have controllers that map blocks larger than 4K. maxRAID is ideal for these drives because the larger indirection unit does not impact performance or wear.

Consumer SSDs: While consumer SSDs work with maxRAID, they often have higher read latencies, lower endurance, and performance inconsistencies (due to pSLC caching). However, maxRAID can mitigate these issues, and in some cases, consumer SSDs can outperform datacenter and enterprise SSDs in a parity array.

RAID Levels

maxRAID supports multiple configurations:

Single SSD: Ideal for using a single drive without redundancy.

RAID-0: Maximizes capacity but does not provide drive-level redundancy.

RAID-1: A simple 2-drive mirror offering redundancy when only two drives are available.

RAID-5: This is the most common configuration. It is space-efficient and fast, and RAID-5: This configuration minimizes wear through fewer total writes than RAID-10.

RAID-6: Nearly as fast as RAID-5, RAID-6 employs efficient parity calculations (with modern x86_64 processors masking most overhead) and can handle more than one concurrent drive failure.

RAID-10/50/60: These configurations offer no additional protection, capacity, or performance benefits over RAID-5/6 and are not recommended.

Supported Distributions

maxRAID is primarily a kernel module solution, so we support specific Linux kernels:

RHEL 8/9: Supports every x86_64 production kernel release from Red Hat, along with select releases from Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.

Ubuntu LTS 22/24: Covers all server “-generic” x86_64 kernels from Ubuntu’s production releases.

Others: Additional distributions are supported based on demand.

Custom Kernels: Wildfire Storage collaborates with OEMs and major cloud providers to include their custom kernels in our build set.

Block Device Questions

maxRAID creates a standard block device that works wherever block devices are used:

File Systems: Yes

LVM: Yes

SWAP: Yes – maxRAID is “swap safe,” supporting swap files, partitions, or logical volumes.

Partitions: Yes (most users deploy LVM)

Snapshots: No – while maxRAID doesn’t natively support snapshots, LVM and certain file systems on top of maxRAID do.

TRIM/Discard: Yes

TRIM/Zeros: Yes – writing blocks of all zeros is functionally equivalent to a trim/discard.

512b/4K Blocksize: Yes – the device can be configured to present either a 512-byte or 4K block size.

512b/4K SSDs: Yes – maxRAID can be configured to issue only 4K I/O operations for SSDs that require them.

Targets: Yes – you can export a maxRAID device (or portions of it via LVM) over fabrics like iSCSI or NVMe-OF.