Configure flash drives in High I/O instances as data drives

The two 1.6 TB PCIe flashcards included with the OnMetal I/O flavor come unformatted. Use the following steps to configure your flashcards for use as a data disk.

1. Determine what devices are the PCIe block devices.

   Note: Find the high performance PCIe cards by running lsblk -oNAME, MODEL and looking for devices listed with model NWD-BLP* or XP6302*.

2. Apply best SSD settings for each devices (sub DEVICENAME with name identified in step 1).

    echo noop | sudo tee /sys/block/DEVICENAME/queue/scheduler
    echo 4096 | sudo tee /sys/block/DEVICENAME/queue/nr_requests
    echo 1024 | sudo tee /sys/block/DEVICENAME/queue/max_sectors_kb
    echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/block/DEVICENAME/queue/nomerges
    echo 512 | sudo tee /sys/block/DEVICENAME/device/queue_depth
   

3. (Optional) Partition the created Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) device if you prefer, or you can create a file system (FS) directly.

4. Create an ext4 FS on it.

    mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0