SSD Drive Advice for boot pool/database

[NASbox]

I am looking for a couple of cheap SSDs to use for the boot pool (and the database - I want the box bootable with the data pools offline in the event I need to do so for troubleshooting).

I can get a pair of Silicon Power SU256GBSS3A58A25CA drives quite cheaply. I plan to run the boot pool as a mirror.

Any good reason to use anything any better?

 

[HoneyBadger]

That model comes back to the A58, which I believe runs the inexpensive Phison S11 controller. How cheap is "quite cheaply"?

Personally, a mirrored boot environment to me suggests somewhere where reliability is fairly crucial, so cost wouldn't be quite as strong of a concern; but I'd grab a couple of used Intel DC S3500's for $15-20ea instead.

 

[NASbox]

That model comes back to the A58, which I believe runs the inexpensive Phison S11 controller. How cheap is "quite cheaply"?

Personally, a mirrored boot environment to me suggests somewhere where reliability is fairly crucial, so cost wouldn't be quite as strong of a concern; but I'd grab a couple of used Intel DC S3500's for $15-20ea instead.

@HoneyBadger Thanks for the reply. I'd be interested if you see any errors in my thinking. I'm not up on SSD controllers etc, so I'm looking for guidance.

I'm in Canada, so I don't have access to as wide a range of inexpensive products as in the US. I also looked on Amazon, and that appears to be a very expensive high end enterprise drive. I took a look at EBay, and there were no S3500 drives in anywhere close to that range... in fact the delivery costs were over the amount you mentioned. If there is something that I'm missing, please point me in the right direction.

<aside>At this moment I can buy a 500GB Samsung 870EVO for about $70--great deal for a lap top or a caching drive. I'd likely go for a small Adata SU800 if I could get one at a reasonable price ($30<), but the low end of the market seems to have really dried up. On Amazon, there are a lot of 240GB drives selling for less than the 120GB models and even some 500GB selling for less than 120/240GB models depending on brand.</aside>

At the moment I can get the 240GB S58 I mentioned for $24 with no extra delivery charges. Way overkill on the size, but with the extra size comes over double the endurance and some extra performance.

I was looking at the P210S256G25, but the price jumped to a level where it's not worth it. I could get the PBE120GS25SSDR for $17 but I'd have to buy 3 or pay for shipping (which is about the cost of an extra drive). The smaller drive has less than half the endurance (50TBW) and not as good performance.

I know there have been some major changes in the last few years, but it wasn't that long ago that the boot drive was a USB stick. I'm assuming that boot drive performance doesn't have a huge impact on system operation so that I wouldn't really notice the diffence if I put in a high performance drive? Or has that changed?

While a simultaneous failure is possible, the probability is low and if and extra $25 is going to save me a couple of hours (or maybe more because I will have to figure out how to reinstall and restore the backup -- not hard, just haven't done it for 10 years and I'd have to go through the docs.... I'd rather take 10 minutes to change a drive and then rebuild the pool.

I've got an 120GB HP S700 and a 120GB Kingston A40 on the system now. They have been there for about 3 years and the A40 which is only 40TBW is about 30% and is starting to throw the occasional CRC error.... not sure if it's the connections, the cable, the controller or the drive.
The TLDR; question: is a pair of A58 drives going to create worse system performance than what I have now?

I'm thinking about moving to SCALE, so I thought get new drives, install Scale, import the pools and if I don't like it, just put the old drives back and re-import the pools.

Any/All constructive comments/suggestions welcomed. I really appreciate this very knowledgeable community.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I'm in Canada, so I don't have access to as wide a range of inexpensive products as in the US. I also looked on Amazon, and that appears to be a very expensive high end enterprise drive. I took a look at EBay, and there were no S3500 drives in anywhere close to that range... in fact the delivery costs were over the amount you mentioned. If there is something that I'm missing, please point me in the right direction.

Ah, that definitely changes things - the delivery charges and exchange rate send things for a loop on that side of the border. Your 240GB A58's for CAD$24 delivered make a lot of sense there, as that's comparable cost per GB for entry level SSDs. The Patriot alternative you listed there is the "Burst Elite" which might actually be worse as it appears to be a QLC SSD vs the TLC of the SiliconPower.

I'm assuming that boot drive performance doesn't have a huge impact on system operation so that I wouldn't really notice the diffence if I put in a high performance drive? Or has that changed?

You're still correct on this front - the boot drive is just the boot drive, unless you make use of the "DIY" scripts that leverage it for an additional purpose (which isn't advised, as it puts you outside of the commonly supported workflow.) The reason for my leaning toward the Intel disks is for a stability/reliability reason, but the S11 seems to be "stable, albeit slow" for ZFS use.

The TLDR; question: is a pair of A58 drives going to create worse system performance than what I have now?

No, you won't see any really appreciable performance difference at all, other than in the speed of booting or applying updates. I even have a machine running from an HDD for boot. (Blasphemy, I know, but it works.)

 

[NASbox]

Ah, that definitely changes things - the delivery charges and exchange rate send things for a loop on that side of the border. Your 240GB A58's for CAD$24 delivered make a lot of sense there, as that's comparable cost per GB for entry level SSDs. The Patriot alternative you listed there is the "Burst Elite" which might actually be worse as it appears to be a QLC SSD vs the TLC of the SiliconPower.



You're still correct on this front - the boot drive is just the boot drive, unless you make use of the "DIY" scripts that leverage it for an additional purpose (which isn't advised, as it puts you outside of the commonly supported workflow.) The reason for my leaning toward the Intel disks is for a stability/reliability reason, but the S11 seems to be "stable, albeit slow" for ZFS use.



No, you won't see any really appreciable performance difference at all, other than in the speed of booting or applying updates. I even have a machine running from an HDD for boot. (Blasphemy, I know, but it works.)

Thanks @HoneyBadger I really appreciate the input-super helpful! I went and did some searching on the Phison S11 and based on this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/90glkw/buyer_beware_sata_ssds_with_phison_s11_controllers/
I don't want anything to do with it. It appears that the A40 that is giving me problems is the same controller (at least I ran across a comment in a forum that said it was).

No, you won't see any really appreciable performance difference at all, other than in the speed of booting or applying updates. I even have a machine running from an HDD for boot. (Blasphemy, I know, but it works.)

Am I correct that the only times the database is used are at boot to create a config, and to store configuration changes made in the WebGUI? I would assume a hard drive would be a lot slower than an SSD especially since the majority of the IO would be small random reads. So durability is clearly the name of the game.

Am I correct that a large sparsely used drive (10%) is going to last a lot longer than a smaller fuller drive (40%)? IIUC the controller is going to cycle through all that empty space when it is using blocks to rewrite. So if the NAND on the small drive sees 1000 writes/block, the large drive is going to see less than 1/2 that many cycles... more like 1/3, but I'm too lazy to do the math :).

Any thoughts on the Lexar LNS100-256RBNA? Not sure who makes Lexar now... they were once a good brand, but I suspect like HP they may have sold out. However, the endurance is decent at 128TBW. I found a YouTube review that looked pretty impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3QZOS4QRoY -- Compared against the 860EVO which was/is a decent drive.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Thanks @HoneyBadger I really appreciate the input-super helpful! I went and did some searching on the Phison S11 and based on this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/90glkw/buyer_beware_sata_ssds_with_phison_s11_controllers/
I don't want anything to do with it. It appears that the A40 that is giving me problems is the same controller (at least I ran across a comment in a forum that said it was).

That could well be the case. SSD controllers and their firmware are a bit of a "black box" that we unfortunately don't get a lot of insight into the inner workings of.

Am I correct that the only times the database is used are at boot to create a config, and to store configuration changes made in the WebGUI? I would assume a hard drive would be a lot slower than an SSD especially since the majority of the IO would be small random reads. So durability is clearly the name of the game.

Boot time, configuration changes, and applying updates of course. I haven't really noticed anything in terms of performance on my HDD-booting system, other than taking a fair bit longer to apply updates - it's running from a laptop HDD, and isn't rebooted frequently.

Am I correct that a large sparsely used drive (10%) is going to last a lot longer than a smaller fuller drive (40%)? IIUC the controller is going to cycle through all that empty space when it is using blocks to rewrite. So if the NAND on the small drive sees 1000 writes/block, the large drive is going to see less than 1/2 that many cycles... more like 1/3, but I'm too lazy to do the math :).

Yes, free space in a partition on an SSD is (generally) used by the firmware for wear-leveling purposes and will let it last much longer. Once you get out of the "cheap USB stick" territory though, you're probably safe as far as endurance goes.

Any thoughts on the Lexar LNS100-256RBNA? Not sure who makes Lexar now... they were once a good brand, but I suspect like HP they may have sold out. However, the endurance is decent at 128TBW. I found a YouTube review that looked pretty impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3QZOS4QRoY -- Compared against the 860EVO which was/is a decent drive.

Lexar NS100 appears to use the Marvell 88NV1120, which seems to be shared with a few other Lexar models and the HP S600. It looks like a viable option but I've never used one personally.

 

[MrGuvernment]

I am also in Canada, just filter your searches for Canada only to try and find something close, seems hit and miss some days for sure though.

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A better performing drive for the $20 or so range would be the TeamGroup T-force drives vs the A58 drives: (I was also recently looking for 2 drives for a raid1 for the OS and dug in deep), not sure on overall quality of the Silicon Motion SM2259XT controller though..

All of these cheap drives just lack DDR cache on them, so they use a little bit of the system ram to function, which only really comes into effect if your doing large file work or transferring a lot, which as the OS drive should be minimal and likely kept to small file size I/O,

Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan Z 240 GB Specs

240 GB, TLC, SATA 6 Gbps, 2.5"

www.techpowerup.com

Amazon.ca

 

[NASbox]

Thanks @HoneyBadger, @MrGuvernment for the input. I spent way more time on this than I wanted to, but for what it's worth I decided to get a pair of Lexar LNS100-256RB. It will likely take me a day or two to open one and give it a check. I'll keep an eye out over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday and if something better comes along I can still take them back if I haven't opened the boxes.

Any way to "benchmark" on TrueNAS? Failing that what about Linux? It seems most of the fancy benchmark stuff is aimed at Windows.

A better performing drive for the $20 or so range would be the TeamGroup T-force drives vs the A58 drives: (I was also recently looking for 2 drives for a raid1 for the OS and dug in deep), not sure on overall quality of the Silicon Motion SM2259XT controller though..

All of these cheap drives just lack DDR cache on them, so they use a little bit of the system ram to function, which only really comes into effect if your doing large file work or transferring a lot, which as the OS drive should be minimal and likely kept to small file size I/O,

How much experience have you had with TeamGroup? It has been several years since I bought one. I was looking for something to throw in an old "netbook" (so it wasn't worth spening much money), and the thing lasted about 3 days. Tons of bad sectors, so I returned it and got my money back. Have things changed, or maybe just certain lines? I've been happy with ADATA SU800s (put in netbooks/old computers) when I could get them for a decent price. They have double the rated endurance of the lower end models, so far so good for the ones that I have.

Canada Computers (a big Canadian Franchise chain that equals or betters Amazon for price on many items offers the advantage of instant local pickup because I have stores nearby where I live/work) has carried them for a long time, so maybe that says something. I would definitely be interested in feedback on TeamGroup.... have I been too quick to judge.

 

[MrGuvernment]

I haven't used many myself, but like you, i tend to dig in too deep when researching and suddenly hours, or days have gone by and I am still undecided! I could not find much about their failure rates, and most post you find have people liking them. Considering the price, I wouldn't expect much, but on the other side you have Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVM;s that don't flush their cache and give you crap performance and Samsung is not willing to fix it, so cost sometimes doesn't seem to matter :D

I think your safe with the Lexar, they have always been solid.

 

[NASbox]

IConsidering the price, I wouldn't expect much, but on the other side you have Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVM;s that don't flush their cache and give you crap performance and Samsung is not willing to fix it, so cost sometimes doesn't seem to matter :D

@MrGuvernment Thanks for the reply.... I'm going to watch the sales for the next few days and see if anything better comes along, if not, I'll keep them. I don't really need anything that performant.

Shame on Samsung - Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVM's .... thanks for giving this some light. I've got an 1TB 870 which has been very good (so far... about a year I think)

I think your safe with the Lexar, they have always been solid.

They used to (and maybe still do) make very good SDCards, but I thought they had "sold out" the name as far as SSD were concerned. If anybody knows please share here. If/when I deploy the drives I'll do my best to circle back and leave a comment.