m.2 Sata SSD?

[kspare]

We tried using some Samsung Evo 860 m.2 sata ssd's for caching and they are already showing 8% life left....

Looking for something with a life span similar to a p3700. has to be m.2 sata and not nvme.

Any recommendations?

 

[jgreco]

We tried using some Samsung Evo 860 m.2 sata ssd's for caching and they are already showing 8% life left....

Let me guess, your working set size is a lot larger than your ARC and also a good bit larger than the size of the L2ARC?

ZFS does a crap job of figuring out what to evict to L2ARC if the ARC is too small. This can cause unnecessary thrashing out to L2ARC, which kills endurance.

Related to https://www.ixsystems.com/community...res-more-resources-for-the-same-result.28178/ which I'm sure you've seen, but linked here for the rest of the audience.

 

[kspare]

honestly, I have them in a synology nas we use fro veeam backups and they are wearing down really fast...just looking for something a little mroe robust. settled on a sandisk drive that had a really good life span.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Very few options in M.2 SATA with higher endurance, most "enterprise" stuff in that form factor is read-intensive or designed to be a boot drive. There's some newer NVMe ones but that won't help you here.

Closest option I'd say is the Micron 5100 Pro series, and then throw some extra spare area on there yourself (you might have to do this at the drive firmware level if it's going in a Synology, I don't know if you can do undersized partitions through those.)

(You could try with an ECO and apply a 50% haircut through the FlexCap firmware - that should give you roughly the same endurance. 1920GB ECO is 3.2PBW, 960GB PRO is 4.4PBW, the MAX line at 960GB is 8.8PBW though.)

 

[jgreco]

honestly, I have them in a synology nas we use fro veeam backups and they are wearing down really fast...just looking for something a little mroe robust. settled on a sandisk drive that had a really good life span.

Well, you might not find it. That's why I was asking about the problem, trying to look at it from the other side. If you have an environment that is extremely intense on write updates, L2ARC thrashing is going to be a thing, but typical VM environments aren't like that unless you're rebuilding your VM's daily or something like that. My point was that if you can feel out your working set size and see if you can boost the RAM such that ZFS can do a better job of picking for evictions, that could result in a substantial drop in L2ARC writes.

 

[kspare]

Thanks guys. this is why I like my freenas, I just need to be able to run an ext4 volume so I can fill it right up, hence the synology. Very odd that the card you put in will support nvme...tested it in windows, but synology will only see sata m2 drives in it....odd.

 

[HoneyBadger]

It may depend on the host system as well as the exact model of the card. There's a compatibility list on their site; you can pull a drop-down to select the sub-model of adapter card (or internal slot)

Compatibility List | Synology Inc.

Synology strives to improve product compatibility. Check out our compatibility list before purchasing the peripherals you need.

www.synology.com

I'm assuming you're only using this in a read cache scenario?

 

[kspare]

I saw that.. I ended up ordering a couple Sandisk X600 1tb drives, so we'll see how those do. they had better endurance than the intel 4510's

 

[HoneyBadger]

Unless I'm misreading something, the Sandisk X600 1TB is rated at 400TBW lifetime [1] vs the Intel D3-S4510 960GB M.2 at 2.3PBW [2].

[1] https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam.../SanDisk-X600-3D-NAND-SATA-SSD-Data-Sheet.pdf
[2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...series-960gb-m-2-80mm-sata-6gb-s-3d2-tlc.html