MindServ

If you want speed (and also low CPU impact) you need a dedicated RAID card, though those ones are really expensive, especially if you want to use RAID 10! (Perhaps look into used hardware?) I'm not really that used to dedicated RAID adapters outside server grade stuff from the big guys like HP, Dell and IBM, so I can't give you any good advice there.. But one thing I do know about them is that the boot time will be sloooow.. But I totally get the idea of having this kind of hardware reliability, it's kinda nice even if it's not really 100% necessary! About the HDD's, you should pick drives that are meant for that kind of use, like Seagate IronWolf Pro or WD Red Pro. SATA drives works, or if you want more speed, SAS. In either case, RAID 10 is a really solid storage option, but you still need a backup solution!

Well although it's not too common that SSD's fail, a German test of SSD's shows that a Crucial BX 200 drive lasts 2.5 times (280 TB total) longer than the specified, and a Samsung SSD 850 PRO drive reached 60 times (9.1 petabytes total!) the specified lifetime. So if you don't write absolutely huge amounts of data you would be pretty safe as long as you use high grade SSD from like Samsung or Intel. Source: https://www.ontrack.com/blog/2018/02/07/how-long-do-ssds-really-last/

Do I understand this right, you tried to connect 3.3V to GND? If so, that's not a good idea since it will short out the 3.3V!! That could most definitely fry the motherboard and also the drive connected to the adapter.

It's kinda hard to know what is going on there, but do you get far enough in the boot process that you could try safe mode? (Guess you have already tried that though..) Also, with "turn off", do you mean that it restarts or power off?

Well I think you should use RAID, preferably RAID 1 or 10. But to make it easier an less expensive over time a great way to implement it are to use one set of enterprise SLC SSD's for log and tempdb stuff and another set of, perhaps cheaper consumer grade MLC SSD's, for data and index. (Since data and index aren't that write intensive) You can also use RAID 5 or 6 to spread the writes over several SSD's, though you loose some of the speed of RAID 1 or 10. Whichever solution you choose, make sure you do replace the SSD's way ahead of their expected lifetime, at least some of the drives, and of course have a well configured backup! Though I'm sure you are way ahead of me on that one! Edit: I was thinking MS SQL, but it's pretty much the same with MySQL.

Yeah, it's probably fine if you use drives with high write endurance. Though RAID is tricky with SSD's since the writes usually are more or less the same on each drive, which can lead to drives that fail at almost the same time, or when the RAID tries to rebuild after a failed drive. (Depending on RAID type used)

One more thing to consider is the fact that you probably should use a enterprise grade SSD for databases. I've had a few Intel consumer SSD's die after less then a year when used as database storage, though it has been on servers with quite a lot of stuff going on. (Used cheap consumer SSD's since it was only for testing purposes)

Ok! In that case, this might be interesting: https://www.percona.com/live/17/sessions/performance-analysis-nvme-ssds-and-their-implication-real-world-databases

Du you mean NVMe or SATA drive?

I agree with @lee32uk , don't pay that much for the RAM, even if it looks cool with RGB ? I would perhaps put it into a M.2 NVMe drive instead of the SATA-600 one. https://au.pcpartpicker.com/product/P4ZFf7/samsung-970-evo-500gb-m2-2280-solid-state-drive-mz-v7e500bw

You got some good years out of it anyway! Perhaps it's time for the electronics graveyard now.. Hope you get it sorted out anyhow!

Well that's not a brand I'm familiar with. If it's not a name brand PSU it could be of not so good quality (not necessarily though of course) and that makes me suspect it as the faulty component.. (since that's kinda common with less known PSU brands) I would recommend a Seasonic, Corsair or EVGA PSU. Almost all of their products are pretty good, though I would still not go for the cheapest ones.

Yes, you should remove the GPU too if you can, best to start out with the bare minimum. The PSU could have fried something inside and don't smell that much, or nothing at all for that matter. What PSU brand is it btw?

Wikipedia have a neat list in the 80 Plus article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus But in general, higher certification means better quality since it's more or less needed to reach the higher certification mark.

Do you mean something like this? https://www.ebay.com/p/Mini-Pci-e-PCI-Express-to-4-USB-3-0-Ports-Adapter-Card-ITX-to-Dual-20pin-Cable/508860151?iid=122110505653&rt=nc And also, like @Evanair, I'm a bit curious about what motherboard you have that lacks USB headers?