What are some good SATA and Nvme boot drives? Looking for drives under 250gb.
Name your top 5 for each.
Name your top 5 for each.
What are some good SATA and Nvme boot drives?
- Thread starter Serverking
- Start date
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SATA-wise I've been very happy with the boring workhorses of the Intel D3-S4500 series the past few years, before that the S3500 and S3700 series. I've also used a fair few of the Micron 5100/5200 - they're usually cheaper than the Intel drives and performance is indistinguishable.
I've been making my first forays in to using NVME drives for boot and I'm dead chuffed with the Intel P4101s. Relatively cheap for a low-end enterprise drive due to relatively lacklustre seq writes (not that I care much about seq performance on an OS drive), but plenty performance for reads and random writes. Two of them in a RAID1 are noticeably faster than the D2-S4510's that preceded them.
I've been making my first forays in to using NVME drives for boot and I'm dead chuffed with the Intel P4101s. Relatively cheap for a low-end enterprise drive due to relatively lacklustre seq writes (not that I care much about seq performance on an OS drive), but plenty performance for reads and random writes. Two of them in a RAID1 are noticeably faster than the D2-S4510's that preceded them.
What roles are people using NVME drives for? I’m still a bit on the fence between swapping out a couple SSD’s for NVME drives on a desktop and workstation computer that primarily interacts with a local file server on a 10GBE network. Besides computer boot and application load times, I’m not sure what other loads/task would benefit greatly from a NVME drive.
Options for 22110 drives with power protection are few and far between, which seems like an important feature to have.
As to OP’s question, I’ve seen a lot of good things about Intel’s SSD/NVME drives, especially towards the enterprise end. I’ve had great experiences with Crucial/Micron SSD’s as well.
Options for 22110 drives with power protection are few and far between, which seems like an important feature to have.
As to OP’s question, I’ve seen a lot of good things about Intel’s SSD/NVME drives, especially towards the enterprise end. I’ve had great experiences with Crucial/Micron SSD’s as well.
A boot drive for Linux/FreeBSD can be almost anything, a slow 5400rpm IDE is usually plenty. A good quality USB drive would great here, though it is impossible to find, they all like to lie about fsync.
So for the last few years I've bought something like Intel S3500 for $20-£30 each
Just did a quick search, Micron 500DC 240GB for $22 Micron M500DC 240GB MLC SATA 6Gbps 2.5-inch SSD MTFDDAK240MBB-1AE1 | eBay
The Micron 500DC is very low latency and a good performer, endurance is around 1 dwpd.
You can also find the 480GB version for around 45-50 USD.
So for the last few years I've bought something like Intel S3500 for $20-£30 each
Just did a quick search, Micron 500DC 240GB for $22 Micron M500DC 240GB MLC SATA 6Gbps 2.5-inch SSD MTFDDAK240MBB-1AE1 | eBay
The Micron 500DC is very low latency and a good performer, endurance is around 1 dwpd.
You can also find the 480GB version for around 45-50 USD.
For me at least, port availability. My latest board has two M2 ports so I thought whet the hell, let's see how that goes. The speed benefit is marginal at best for OS operations (I'm running linux so boots and patch installations were already near instantaneous) although there's been an appreciable benefit to cache operations. The downside is no hot-swap I'm aware of, so replacing a dead drive would likely mean a reboot.
IMHO full PLP is less important on OS drives; they very rarely have any heavy writes in flight. Even so I pulled one half of the P4101 RAID1 in the middle of a kernel upgrade and managed to boot from it fine. Personally I'd only want to splurge on PLP for things like SLOGs or database drives.
There's a system I came across in November, a greybox linux machine that's still perfectly happy running off of two SATA2 OCZ Agility drives of 2009 vintage; we've got some S3500s to replace them with if and when they fail. I'm still running one of my backup servers booting off of two stone-aged SATA1 HP FK0032CAAZP (server pulls from circa 2009) that are still at 95% lifetime. These are both dog-slow drives by any stretch of the imagination and all but worthless but perfectly functional for boot drives.
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Make sure you run the latest firmware on them.... otherwise they are dogshit... nasty performance bugs on early fw. <10 iops during GC, triggers GC randomly not when disk is idle. Reminiscent of the jmicron pauses. But with update, they go from last place to nearly first for that gen.
