SSD Purchasing Suggestions

[warllo]

Good Morning,

I'm looking to add a 3-4 disk solid state array to my TrueNas box which is used in a home lab/ home network environment.

I'm hoping to get 500-1000GB drives at arround $80-100.

Thinking of either mirrored pairs or raid z. I will run apps with TrueNas Scale and maybe run a 1-3 VM's off of this array, the rest of the space will be for general file storage.

I'm hoping someone can provided some suggestion on which SSD's might be a good buy. I'm torn between buying new consumer level drives vs buying used enterprise drives like an intel dc s3500 or 3700.

Please advise.

 

[sretalla]

run a 1-3 VM's off of this array

You probably want mirrors then.

Depending on the churn you envisage, you may be able to get away with the pro samsung models (I see 860 pro 500GB devices available for about $100 where I am. they have a rating for 600 TBW... the 870 EVO 1TB also has a 600TBW rating, so you could consider that if your churn will be low)

The used enterprise drives may be good if they are honestly sharing the consumed TBW to give you an idea of how heavily used they are and how close to exhausting the remaining TBW for you to use.

 

[warllo]

You probably want mirrors then.

This is what I usually read around here on the community. Oddly enough we just ordered a TrueNas x10 ha with sss's for work and IX System preconfigured it with raidz with a hot spare and we run 20-30 vm's off of the x10 and performance is superb.

I might have to give those Samsung ssd a try at that price.

 

[KrisBee]

@warlio You might find this post of interest: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/improve-write-amplification.75482/ It looks at both mirrors and raidz on ssd pools for use with zvol backed VMs and the relative write amplification incurred. For write heavy use I would have thought consumer SSDs would not perform well, having both relatively poor sustained write speeds and low endurance.

 

[warllo]

@KrisBee Very interesting read.

 

[NugentS]

I use Crucial MX500's in that role. They perform reasonably well and should last (on my usage) 4-5 years before they need replacing.

 

[warllo]

@NugentS I read somewhere that the Crucial MX500s report false errors in TrueNAS. Have you had any issues with false errors? Otherwise I think these would work for my needs.

 

[KrisBee]

@NugentS Did your usage/life time calc take into account write amplification? I've not seen any equivalent analysis to that proxmox post done for TrueNAS CORE/SCALE based on their zvol blocksize settings and bhyve VM disk sector size options. The s/hand market in quality enterprise drives ( at least in the UK) has been distorted by the Chia craze. Apart from the mentioned Intel S3700, there's the newer S4510, S4610, or samsung SM863a (default 512/512 drive) , or newer SM883 (512/4096 drive) and anything pro/max from Micron 5100, 5200, 5300 range.

 

[NugentS]

Yes they do. However -C 0 in SMART Extra options fixes that

 

[NugentS]

@NugentS Did your usage/life time calc take into account write amplification? I've not seen any equivalent analysis to that proxmox post done for TrueNAS CORE/SCALE based on their zvol blocksize settings and bhyve VM disk sector size options. The s/hand market in quality enterprise drives ( at least in the UK) has been distorted by the Chia craze. Apart from the mentioned Intel S3700, there's the newer S4510, S4610, or samsung SM863a (default 512/512 drive) , or newer SM883 (512/4096 drive) and anything pro/max from Micron 5100, 5200, 5300 range.

Let me put it this way. I ran some MX500's in RAID 5 (on Synology) for 5 ish Years and still had 20-30% left
I am running MX500's in Mirrored on TrueNAS and they look to be on track for between 4 & 5 years which given the price I am fine with. This is a home lab suffering from server sprawl as I keep trying things (and breaking things). TrueNAS seems harder on the drives than Synology. I do have some Intel 3710's that I am planning on swapping in at some point - but I am not in a hurry

I would not necessarily recommend these for commercial use (unless the proposed use is extremely light) although a customer of mine has run them for 5+ years in a Synology RAID 5 before getting 10% warnings and has swapped them for bigger, longer lasting units at my suggestion. His use consisted of database servers and email servers as well as the usual Domain Controllers and other general stuff. SMB File Serve was kept off the SSD's and used directly from HDD's on a NAS.