Memorial Day Sales - What Should I Buy?

[joeschmuck]

:D So here in the USA the Memorial Day Sales will soon start and I haven't spent any money on a computer part in a long time. So I'm thinking about what I could buy that would be useful to me. I'm sure I don't need any help spending money but since my wife says I'm tight with a buck, I figured it couldn't hurt.

So I have my main computer which has a 500GB SSD (Samsung 850 EVO) and while it's only half full, I tend to clean off the upgrades and restore points frequently as it fills up with this stuff and eats up almost 100GB. Yes, it's a Windoze 7 Pro system with 24 GB RAM. My wish is for a 1TB SSD and I do like the 850 Evo series. My current drive has 18,591 hours, 2% used, and 12TB of data written, meaning I have just a few more years of estimated life on it at the current rate of use. ;)

My main FreeNAS is working like a champ and I see no need to do anything here except maybe replace my VM datastore drive with a new more modern version, a 3TB or 4TB drive depending of the sale price.

Which brings me to my backup FreeNAS machine which has a single 1TB hard drive supporting FreeNAS storage. It started as a test but the test has been going on for several months so I think I should replace the 1TB drive with at least a pair of 3TB drives in a mirror. I don't store much data on this system right now, about 400GB. 3TB would allow me to backup some 200GB of additional data I'd like to save, although it's not critical data. Of course I could get away with a single 3TB drive, after all it is the emergency backup to the main backup. The odds of both NAS's dying at the same time as the computers they backup is very slim. See, money is wedged tight in my wallet.

I can't think of anything else to purchasefor the computers. Maybe my truck would like a gift.

 

[Arwen]

What about surge protectors?

I like the metal housing ones, like Tripp-Lite Isobar. They are physically indestructable.
(Of course, now that I have said that, all mine will start to rust, and then short out :).

 

[m0nkey_]

My wish is for a 1TB SSD and I do like the 850 Evo series.

I'm the same. I wanted a 1TB SSD and planned to get the 850EVO. I ended up getting the WD BLUE 1TB SSD, because it was almost $75 cheaper than the Samsung. Benchmark wise, the 850 EVO wins the 4K writes, but the WD BLUE wins sequential writes in my tests.

 

[Stux]

Treat yourself to a Samsung 960 Pro and experience 4GB/s ;)

 

[Spearfoot]

You really need this gizmo... only $305.20, shipped!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/disk-array-...e=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

Seriously, though... If you're looking for a pair of 3TB disks, I highly recommend the newer HGST DeskStar NAS drives. I recently burned-in a batch of drives and the pair of 4TB HGST DeskStar units were significantly faster than the WD Re drives in the batch.

 

[Redcoat]

Darn it. Before reading this I was content with a used 60 GB SSD from eBay (for a FreeNAS boot drive) and a set of new leads for my Fluke. But now the yearning has started ...
I second the Tripp-Lite Isobar vote - those I have must be 10 + years old and still cranking.

 

[BigDave]

@joeschmuck
I think you need to look at a new NVMe capable motherboard! NO WIRES! Hooo Haaa

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/Z270/C7Z270-CG-L.cfm

 

[Mlovelace]

The 850 Evo is a good drive but the Samsung name carries a premium now. Check out the Crucial MX300 they are easily as good as the Samsung and a bit cheaper.

 

[Dice]

If you've a works station somewhere that could use the power of a NVMe system drive - that'd by my given choice and start repurposing that 500GB drive elsewhere.
Coupled with a new brother of same size and repurposed for VM storage.

Here is my planned path of 'repurposing SSDs'.
I sort of run by that long term plan, get one SSD I can afford of nice size to put as system drive for WS and my (pre-esxi) utlity server. Ie, where I notice performance benefits and experience a system performance revival.
When the time comes to upgrade I try to get another to have them ready for mirror action somewhere in the system. Right now I'm at 2x EV0 850 250GB drives running raid0 on my main machine (which was a total performance loss vs running a single drive. I got one first, then adding the next one for extra storage primarily I experimented with RAID onboard. A mistake). Most recently I got a single 500GB EVO 850 to use as datastore. I intended to run it as WS boot drive but couldn't muster up the energy to do a system re-installation. At some point the plan is to get another 500GB and run all 4 SSD as mirrors in a SSD pool for VM duties. ...while enjoying the NVMe power in my main WS (new and obviously upgraded :P).

 

[Stux]

@joeschmuck
I think you need to look at a new NVMe capable motherboard! NO WIRES! Hooo Haaa

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/Z270/C7Z270-CG-L.cfm

NVMe drives work great in PCIe carrier cards ;)

With the intel consumer chipset boards you need to be aware that the m2 slots are normally hanging off the chipset and can get bottlenecked quite easilt. Ryzen and the X99 boards don't have this problem

 

[Stux]

If you've a works station somewhere that could use the power of a NVMe system drive - that'd by my given choice and start repurposing that 500GB drive elsewhere.
Coupled with a new brother of same size and repurposed for VM storage.

Here is my planned path of 'repurposing SSDs'.
I sort of run by that long term plan, get one SSD I can afford of nice size to put as system drive for WS and my (pre-esxi) utlity server. Ie, where I notice performance benefits and experience a system performance revival.
When the time comes to upgrade I try to get another to have them ready for mirror action somewhere in the system. Right now I'm at 2x EV0 850 250GB drives running raid0 on my main machine (which was a total performance loss vs running a single drive. I got one first, then adding the next one for extra storage primarily I experimented with RAID onboard. A mistake). Most recently I got a single 500GB EVO 850 to use as datastore. I intended to run it as WS boot drive but couldn't muster up the energy to do a system re-installation. At some point the plan is to get another 500GB and run all 4 SSD as mirrors in a SSD pool for VM duties. ...while enjoying the NVMe power in my main WS (new and obviously upgraded :p).

I concur with this plan ;)

When you try it, you should also try a RaidZ1 with the SSDs and do some IOP/bandwidth performance tests

 

[Ericloewe]

Check out the Crucial MX300 they are easily as good as the Samsung and a bit cheaper.

Much slower, actually. Surprisingly so. Samsung is the undisputed king of consumer SATA SSDs, mostly by virtue of actually pushing performance in their controller designs (the others all use controllers from Marvell or lesser-known manufacturers, which are mostly optimized for cost) - I guess having spare fabs in the n-1 node makes it easy for them.

 

[gpsguy]

I like my Sandisk Extreme Pro's with their 10 year warranty.

 

[Dice]

@Stux emphasis on <long term> x)
I like the idea of setting up a few benchmarks.
Imo, there are not enough of those well presented around the forum. There are a bunch of dd's shown, but not that meaningful back to back rundowns to explore these avenues.


I've not yet enough free drives at this very moment, but within a not too distant future I'd have 4x HDD and 4x SSD to play around with. And a SLOG.
1x vdev mirror HDD
1x vdev mirror SSD
2x vdev mirror SSD
2x vdev mirror HDD
1xvdev RaidZ1, 4 drive SSD
I'll probably need some advice on how to conduct the tests in clever ways.

Wouldn't it be quite useful to gather performance from a standardized benchmark, ie, where a testing formula/script can be run by users, and then submitted in a thread to later end up in a resource?
I could probably to the maintenance work.
- however, I lack the skills to setup a generally viable good practice procedure for testing or preferably - a script.

 

[Stux]

A script huh ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

Wow, what a lot of great responces.

What about surge protectors?

I like the metal housing ones, like Tripp-Lite Isobar. They are physically indestructable.
(Of course, now that I have said that, all mine will start to rust, and then short out :).
I have failrly new UPS for my FreeNAS and main computer. I run UPS vice surge protectors on all my computer based electronic equipment. But it was a good attrempt.

Treat yourself to a Samsung 960 Pro and experience 4GB/s ;)

My motherboard only supports SATA II, yea it's a drag but I can't justify replacing a motherboard and 24GB RAM and CPU. I could add a SATA III adapter but the one I had in here is now in my ESXi server.

So I think I'll look hard at both a 1TB SSD and at least one 3TB hard drive. While I'm likely to purchase Samsung and WD respectively, I will keep an open mind for other brands but they need to be reliable.

The 850 Evo is a good drive but the Samsung name carries a premium now.

Doing some research on this drive a few weeks ago and I found out that it has a high 2000 P/E cycles which means that it will last a very long time. My current drive at the current write rate would have it last 210.10 years, theoretically. Of course I will replace it before then.

You really need this gizmo... only $305.20, shipped!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/disk-array-based-on-SuperMicro-BPN-SAS2-847EL1-4U-21-Bay-SAS-SATA-6Gb-s-3-5/161972256386?ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649
View attachment 18359

Seriously, though... If you're looking for a pair of 3TB disks, I highly recommend the newer HGST DeskStar NAS drives. I recently burned-in a batch of drives and the pair of 4TB HGST DeskStar units were significantly faster than the WD Re drives in the batch.

Thanks for bringing this cold war era device to my attention. I'll go ahead and grab it up, at $205 it's a steal! It will really augment my current system...

So do you like it? (That is Uncle Sam in the photo)

Challenge: I did a Google Search for "old computer photo" and this popped up. While I know exactly what this is, I have actually operated 4 of them, does anyone else know what it is?

 

[Redcoat]

An early nuclear submarine control training simulator?

 

[Mlovelace]

Sweet mustache Joe!

Edit: Pic didn't work the first time

 

[joeschmuck]

An early nuclear submarine control training simulator?

Yup and Nope, from what I could look up this came from a submarine and is located in a museum. This is the Reactor Control Panel (RCP) where a few different things were controlled. Electrical power distribution on the right, Reactor in the middle, propulsion on the left. Those two large wheels are the Forward and Aft controls for turning the screw of the ship. The larger one is FWD, smaller one AFT. This looks just like the one on my first three submarines. While I was not nuclear trained, to earn your dolphins you needed to fully understand the basics of every system on the boat and be able to stop the casualty no matter what it was. This could be anything from the reactor issue to flooding from any number of holes in the ships hull or piping, or hydraulic leaks, fire, collision, etc... There are a lot of things which could go wrong so our crews were trained very well. This was a survival thing, we all want to get home to our loved ones. That was long ago. The line printer in the foreground is of course not related at all.

 

[Stux]

An early nuclear submarine control training simulator?

It's a fan controller