Anyone with experience using Samsung 850 Pros?

[sactobob]

I'm seriously looking at these for a FreeNAS box of 6 drives as a back-end for shared data among 3 ESXi boxes and other uses. This FreeNAS box won't store the OS, just shared data among VMs. The specs on these are incredible for "consumer" SSds, which I think at this point is blurred anyways. Except for costs, reliability (MTBF-wise) alone is above most standard HDs.

Performance

Max Sequential Read Up to 550 MBps

Max Sequential Write Up to 520 MBps

4KB Random Read Up to 100,000 IOPS

4KB Random Write Up to 90,000 IOPS

MTBF 2,000,000 hours

Samsung's V-NAND technology is built to handle 150 Terabytes Written (TBW) which equates to a 40GB daily read/write workload over a 10-year period.

I've been testing 4 of the 512GBs and planning on purchasing another 12. They have a 10 year warranty, which I could care less about as long as data is safe, but if Samsung is willing to warranty that long they must have some confidence the drives will do what they say.

Question for the "Pros"; With 6 drives and and I only require around 1.5tb space. RaidZ2, Z3, or mirrored vdev? The data is critical though, is speed going to be an issue in Z2/3 vs. mirrors even with SSDs that are this fast?

PS. The box is dual hex-core 5650s, 64gb ECC, 4x1gb nic that can be lacp across 2 linked cisco switches. The controller is an H200 so no battery backed cache. Maybe need a ZIL/SLog? The system is in a telco facility with UPSes/Generator.. HOWEVER, 3 times in the last 2 months their fancy UPS didn't do its thing, which they tell me has since been addressed, but you never know...

 

[Knuuut]

I'm running 4 1TB Samsung 850 EVO as striped mirrors since Dec 2014 plugged in an HP Gen8 Microserver. No SLOG nor L2ARC device. No trouble at all and happy users. Serving VM images via NFS and ISCSI runnig on 2 KVM-Servers.

Keep an eye on smart attribute #241 Total_LBAs_Written.

Cheers Knuuut

 

[sactobob]

Hi Knuuut,

Thanks for your feedback! I'm curious, how many VMs are you running, is that system your only NAS? What's the count on #241 with your workload after 5-6 months? Your 850 EVO (non pro right) has 3 years warranty (newegg, tho amazon says 5), but it looks like the same 150TBW. The cost difference for 850 pro vs. non-pro is about $150 on Amazon, $497 vs $350 respectively. But all the specs look nearly the same except for 10 year warranty on the Pro.

Also, did you had any more Nics with the 1 PCI solt or just 1 GB? That seems would be a bottleneck on an active environment.

 

[Knuuut]

I'm runnig 12 VMs for now, but it will be more in the future.

afaik the 850 EVOs have got 5 years of warranty and 150TBW instead of 300TBW of the PRO models.

Todays smart #241 output is 3956718220, which is a bit less than 2TB.

I've assembled a round-robin lagg with the 2 onboard NICs which is runnig fine, even where they aren't from Intel. ;-)

No problem to saturate the lagg with 2 1Gb hosts with dd and nfs. Even the CPU (celeron!) load is acceptable while running this. It could serve 2Gb/s.

 

[Bigdata992]

I am running 4 Dell R610's with ESXi 5.5 connected via 10GbE to a Dell R510 with 12 Samsung 1 Tb Pro's. Each R610 has 192 Gb Ram, R510 has 96 Gb running FreeNAS 9.3. I am extremely happy and running my startup DEV/QA/PROD VM's. Last count I had 130ish VM's. I haven't had any trouble. Looking to add a second R510. I buy them used from cloud providers on ebay at the end of their life for about $700 apiece. If I have trouble with a server I pull it out and throw it away.

 

[Knuuut]

@Bigdata992: Thank you for sharing your experience with us. What's your zpool configuration and what kind of VMs (Windoze, Linux, BSD, File- ,DB-, Web-Server etc...) you're runnig? Did you do any zfs tuning (SLOG-Device, L2ARC-Device, zfs properties, ...) ?

Thanks in advance

 

[wreedps]

Also curious in the above question.