SSD Smart Path

SSDs require special tactics to capture the full advantage of their low-latency capabilities. HPE SSD Smart Path enables the high performance of SSD-based logical volumes by allowing certain types of I/O requests to take a more direct path to the physical disks, bypassing most of the firmware layers of the RAID controller. SSD Smart Path is enabled by default when you create an array.

The HPE Smart Array device driver software coordinates with HPE Smart Array controller firmware to

  • Maintain the necessary disk mapping information.

  • Decide which IO requests are eligible for HPE SSD Smart Path.

All other requests, as well as any error handling, are still routed through the normal IO path on the HPE Smart Array controller. This method has the following benefits:

  • Benefits repetitive, read-heavy I/O workloads using the accelerated path.

  • Frees up more IO handling capacity on the normal IO path.