HPE 844761-001 (PM1633) 400GB NVMe SSD Enterprise Solid State Drive Product Introduction

Product Overview

    HPE 844761-001 (disk body model PM1633) is an early enterprise grade NVMe solid-state drive and one of HPE's first NVMe solutions to be introduced to the market. It is positioned for read intensive workloads and designed specifically for the HPE ProLiant Gen9 server platform, aiming to provide ultra-low latency and high-speed I/O performance far beyond SATA and SAS interfaces for critical business applications. This hard drive represents HPE's exploration of enterprise level storage acceleration in the early days of NVMe technology, known for its proven stability and reliability.

1. Core features and specifications

Capacity: 400 Gigabytes (GB)

     This is a common capacity point for early NVMe SSDs. The available capacity for its users is less than the nominal value due to a large amount of Over Previewing (OP) space set in the firmware for garbage collection, wear leveling, and maintaining long-term stable high performance.

Interface and Protocol: NVMe 1.1 over PCIe 3.0 x4 Lanes

     At the time of release, it provided revolutionary performance, offering low latency and high bandwidth PCIe direct connectivity for the first time at an enterprise scale.

Form Factor: 2.5 inches U.2 (SFF-8639)

    Adopting a standard 2.5-inch hard drive appearance, it can be installed into the server's standard 2.5-inch hot swappable disk slots (requiring the server backplane to support NVMe protocol).

Performance indicators (typical values):

Continuous reading speed: up to 2500 MB/s

Continuous write speed: up to 800 MB/s

Random read IOPS (4K): up to 280000

Random write IOPS (4K): up to 35000

    Note: By today's standards, its write performance is average, but its read performance was excellent at the time with extremely low latency.

Durability and reliability:

    DWPD (Daily Whole Disk Write Count): Typically 0.7 (within the 5-year warranty period). This means that during the 5-year warranty period, 400GB * 0.7=280GB of data can be written daily.

TBW (maximum number of bytes that can be written): 0.51 Petabytes (PB)

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): 2000000 hours

NAND flash type: MLC NAND

      As an early model, it adopted MLC (Multi Layer Cell) flash memory, which has higher durability and performance consistency than modern TLC flash memory. End to end data protection: Implement protection mechanisms throughout the entire data path to      prevent silent errors during data transmission.

    HPE exclusive firmware and integration: Pre flashed HPE intelligent firmware, deeply integrated with the iLO management engine of HPE ProLiant Gen9 servers, achieving out of the box compatibility.

3. Typical application scenarios

     This NVMe SSD is optimized for the following applications on the HPE Gen9 platform:

Server operating system boot drive: Provides extremely fast system startup speed and is the best boot drive choice for Gen9 servers.

Read intensive cache: acting as a read cache layer for databases or virtualization environments.

Critical application acceleration: Hosting applications that require quick response.

Virtualization platform: Improve the startup speed and responsiveness of virtual machines.

4. Compatibility

Server Platform: Mainly aimed at HPE ProLiant Gen9 servers that require NVMe enabled backplanes.