Can you get S.M.A.R.T info ?

[Stux]

 

[Black Ninja]

FWIW, I love the performance of the PCIe NVMe Samsung pro drives (950/960)

I am sure I would love their performance too, BUT there is only one thing "wrong" with NVMe, can you guess what that is ?

 

[Stux]

That you need a free PCIe slot?

 

[Black Ninja]

That you need a free PCIe slot?

No the PCIe slot you can get. Most MB have more than one PCIe slot so that's not the ultimate sacrifice. You loose the redundancy. Whatever you put on the NVMe drive will be fast and will be gone fast cause you can make a raid mirror of 2 of them.

 

[Stux]

Depends what you want to use them for. I use them for client drives and run hourly backups to FreeNAS.

 

[Black Ninja]

Client desktop perhaps is where I see them, but it won't have any significant speed improvement over single good sata SSD and if you putting this additional stress on the system to search for any changes and upload them in on freenas , perhaps even worst.
Backup is for disaster recovery situations , is not going to save you from downtime like raid would. We are not talking about saving family photos, we are talking about having your esxi server keep running without interruption when drive fail while running dozen of Virtual Machines for various things. I wouldn't want to rebuild all these machines from backups, if I can just swap a drive instead without even powering off, would you ?

I guess it comes down to where you think is a good idea to use them.