Affordable SSD recommendations for RAID1 H700 RAID Card

[dalekphalm]

Anyone have any recommendations for affordable SSD's to be used with the Dell H700 RAID Card? It has the 1GB RAM module and the BBU installed. It'll be the Boot Drive for ESXi, and the remaining storage will be used as a Datastore for either VM's or for passing SSD VHD chunks to specific VM's (like Plex cache).

 

None of the VM's would particularly benefit from the OS being on an SSD - it'd be things like FreeNAS (which has direct device passthrough to a SAS DAS 12-bay drive enclosure), a Minecraft Server, Plex Server, and a Windows VM running the PSU software (APC Personal Addition with the USB connection to the UPS passed through).

 

So I'm not even sure I want to bother with SSD's at all - in which case I'd likely pick up some 7200 RPM 3.5" HDD's in RAID1.

 

Any recommendations?

[Windows7ge]

On my own VM server I setup a pair of Intel 545S's as a boot disk. Haven't had any problems in the past 9 months. It wasn't hardware RAID though.

[brwainer]

I've done the search for well priced SSDs for ZFS running VMs a few times.

In February 2019 I bought used INTEL SSD DC S3700 800GB for about $100 each

In November 2019 I bought new in box 480GB M500DC for $80 each - prices had gone up for almost all SSDs since February.

I haven't looked at purchasing SSDs since November.

[Jarsky]

You'd be surprised the performance difference when you have multiple VM's running off a Datastore with SSD's vs HDD's. 

My Dell R710's I use Samsung 840/850 EVO's...really affordable for home datastore use ,the 500GB 860 EVO's are only $80...I went with the smaller ones because im actually running mine in RAID5

[The_Ellimist]

2 hours ago, Jarsky said:

You'd be surprised the performance difference when you have multiple VM's running off a Datastore with SSD's vs HDD's. 

My Dell R710's I use Samsung 840/850 EVO's...really affordable for home datastore use ,the 500GB 860 EVO's are only $80...I went with the smaller ones because im actually running mine in RAID5

Whats the performance difference like?

 

I've got 8 1TB 860 evo's sitting here I just bought for 160 each after the cashback waiting for me to do a windows storage spaces video for it. I got them to replace the current 10k sas drives. I'm running about 30VM's atm.

[Jarsky]

I don't have any quantifiable data, but I noticed it moving from 5 x 300gb 10k sas drives to 3 x 500gb Samsung evos with ~20 VMs on my test lab hosts. Also far better for heat and power draw and reliability 

[BloodKnight7]

Dont forget to disable the write cache, you wont be missing it with SSDs.

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, BloodKnight7 said:

Dont forget to disable the write cache, you wont be missing it with SSDs.

Still not sure if I will bother with SSD’s or not, but if I do, I’ll keep that in mind. Technically there would still be a performance benefit but I’m going to be significantly limited by network speed anyway. 

[Dutch_Master]

It depends on what type of SSD you use. For SATA, the 600MB/s speed is the same for both HDD and SSD drives. If you want noticeable speed increases, go PCIe NVMe SSDs instead. You can get reasonably priced (say: cheap) PCIe to M-key M.2 adapters and pretty much any NVMe SSD will outperform a SATA drive by some margin. And if you main board allows 4x4x4x4 bifurcation of a PCIe 16x slot, there's adapters that allow you to mount 4 NVMe SSDs on it for a (software!) RAID6 that'll beat your 10k SAS drives hands down.

 

Having said that, re-allocating some of your budget to network improvements might give you a better deal for the buck in the end. Things like 2.5, 5 or even10G with or without a fibre-optic backbone of your core network infra might be more beneficial for your use case. That choice has to be yours   (well, that's an open door isn't it )

[dalekphalm]

17 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

It depends on what type of SSD you use. For SATA, the 600MB/s speed is the same for both HDD and SSD drives. If you want noticeable speed increases, go PCIe NVMe SSDs instead. You can get reasonably priced (say: cheap) PCIe to M-key M.2 adapters and pretty much any NVMe SSD will outperform a SATA drive by some margin. And if you main board allows 4x4x4x4 bifurcation of a PCIe 16x slot, there's adapters that allow you to mount 4 NVMe SSDs on it for a (software!) RAID6 that'll beat your 10k SAS drives hands down.

The drives will be in a Dell T410 server - I'd be surprised if it was even capable of booting off of a PCIe SSD - but that's definitely not something I'm going to explore.

 

The SSD will be SATA - or SAS, I suppose, but I suspect SAS SSD's will be cost prohibitive if they are even available.

 

The alternative setup would be SATA 7200 RPM HDD's. The purpose of these drives will be the boot drive for ESXi, and then remaining space will be devoted to VM Datastores.

 

Note: the "file server" itself is actually a FreeNAS VM, with a dedicated HBA via PCIe Passthrough, connected to a DAS 12-bay SAS enclosure. There are currently 10 drives in the enclosure, but the primary pool is 6x 3TB 7200 RPM SAS drives in RAIDZ1 (I will likely eventually switch to RAIDZ2 during the next big drive upgrade, but not anytime soon). There are also 2x 2TB drives and 2x 4TB drives, both in mirrored vdev ("RAID1").

 

So the performance of the drives inside the server itself (either 2x SSD's or 2x HDD's, in RAID1 via the H700 RAID Card) is of less importance than the big RAIDZ1 pool.

 

I may use an SSD or 2 for individual datastores for specific uses - such as as a location for the cache of my Plex Server.

Quote

Having said that, re-allocating some of your budget to network improvements might give you a better deal for the buck in the end. Things like 2.5, 5 or even10G with or without a fibre-optic backbone of your core network infra might be more beneficial for your use case. That choice has to be yours   (well, that's an open door isn't it )

Network improvements are essentially not possible with this setup. The server and associated equipment lives inside the furnace closet. The router and primary network equipment is on an "island" wall (a 6 foot section of wall in the middle of the room). There is no way to run a cable hidden from this section of wall to the server in the closet.

 

At the moment I've been using PowerLine ethernet to very poor results (We're talking something like 5 Mbps). I recently picked up a WIFI bridge, since Wireless AC 5GHZ performance is solid (it can more or less saturate my 150/10 DOCSIS 3.0 connection).

 

Therefore the current plan, network wise, is to use the WIFI Bridge to connect to the existing WIFI network, and connect the server using the Ethernet port on the Bridge. I've disabled the repeater networks, to avoid unnecessary WIFI network congestion. The distance to the AP is only like 15 feet tops, so the connection strength should be decent.

 

I won't know end-result throughput until I'm able to test file transfers.

 

Edit: To explain the limitations of the networking:

I rent a basement apartment. A really nice one - but I can't go around punching holes in walls, etc. It was also hard enough to convince my fiancee to allow me to use CableMate cable runners to hide the surround sound speaker cables. I will not get "wife approval" to run ethernet cables across the ceiling.

 

Eventually when we move into a proper house we own, this will not be an issue, and I will do full networking likely across the entire house.

[The_Ellimist]

6 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

It depends on what type of SSD you use. For SATA, the 600MB/s speed is the same for both HDD and SSD drives. If you want noticeable speed increases, go PCIe NVMe SSDs instead. You can get reasonably priced (say: cheap) PCIe to M-key M.2 adapters and pretty much any NVMe SSD will outperform a SATA drive by some margin. And if you main board allows 4x4x4x4 bifurcation of a PCIe 16x slot, there's adapters that allow you to mount 4 NVMe SSDs on it for a (software!) RAID6 that'll beat your 10k SAS drives hands down.

 

Having said that, re-allocating some of your budget to network improvements might give you a better deal for the buck in the end. Things like 2.5, 5 or even10G with or without a fibre-optic backbone of your core network infra might be more beneficial for your use case. That choice has to be yours   (well, that's an open door isn't it )

that 600MB/s limit is the limit of sata sure but no spinning media approaches that. Also you have the random read/write improvements of SATA SSD's to account for. Even SATA SSD's far outstrip the performance of those 10k SAS drives. Also lets say you replace all the spinning media with the same number of SSD's I would expect performance to be massively different as you have throughput of multiple SATA SSD's flooding those links.

[GDRRiley]

used intel drives are my pick. I'm just using this guide

https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-freenas-nas-servers/top-picks-freenas-boot-drives/