Hey all,
I've been thinking abotu what kinds of SSD's to use for cache devices and other high write environments these days.
WAY back I would have had to pay big bucks for a tiny SLC drive for something like this. Can't find those anymore.
More recently Samsung's Pro drives were MLC and had some pretty serious write endurance.
The latest gen Pro drives (980 Pro) now appear to be TLC, and it has me a little concerned.
That said, these things are so cheap now, so maybe I'll just get a couple of 500GB or 1TB Inland Premium drives for $59.99 or $119.99 respectively, and just beat the crap out of them until they are worn out and replace them. They have decent writes and DRAM caches, so they are surprisingly good little devices for the price, as reviewed by Servethehome here.
(Just keep in mind that Inland Premium are different from Inland Professional and Inland Platinum. The premium is what you want, at least for this application)
What do you people think?
I am a little torn.
The truth is, that with each generation of controller, NAND quality and whatever magic makes the controllers work (write amplification, wear balancing, DRAM cache's etc. etc.) improves. There is a reason you essentially can't buy an SLC drive anymore. They just aren't necessary. MLC got better to the point where it could fill that role.
The question is, have we gotten to the point where TLC is really ready to supplant MLC in high write applications?
My old 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SATA drives I have been using as write cache for years are MLC and are rated at 150TBW each. At 69,000 power on hours, and 317110382829 LBA's (~147.6 TB) written they are both listed at a wear leveling count of 30%, so they are starting to get close. (well, I mean, if 70% wear came in 69000 hours, that means I have ~30,000 hours or 3.5 years left, but I don't want to push it TOO far)
The aforementioned Inland Premium drives are Phison E12 TLC drives. The 512GB model (to keep it as close to an "apples to apples" comparison as possible) is rated at over 5x the write endurance, at 780TBW.
If these numbers are accurate, and measured the same way Samsung did on my old 850 Pro's, maybe MLC really is no longer needed? I mean those old MLC 850 Pro's are going to give me a projected final lifespan of 11.25 years in my high write environment. If the Inland Premiums truly get 5.2x longer life, that should give me 58.5 years. I don't know if I'll be around in 2080 (probably not unless we see some amazing medical progress!), but I feel like I know for sure that at least my current server build will be long obsolete...
Any thoughts? What are you using that is this side of affordable. (I mean if budgets were unlimited, I'd just put Optanes in everything
I've been thinking abotu what kinds of SSD's to use for cache devices and other high write environments these days.
WAY back I would have had to pay big bucks for a tiny SLC drive for something like this. Can't find those anymore.
More recently Samsung's Pro drives were MLC and had some pretty serious write endurance.
The latest gen Pro drives (980 Pro) now appear to be TLC, and it has me a little concerned.
That said, these things are so cheap now, so maybe I'll just get a couple of 500GB or 1TB Inland Premium drives for $59.99 or $119.99 respectively, and just beat the crap out of them until they are worn out and replace them. They have decent writes and DRAM caches, so they are surprisingly good little devices for the price, as reviewed by Servethehome here.
(Just keep in mind that Inland Premium are different from Inland Professional and Inland Platinum. The premium is what you want, at least for this application)
What do you people think?
I am a little torn.
The truth is, that with each generation of controller, NAND quality and whatever magic makes the controllers work (write amplification, wear balancing, DRAM cache's etc. etc.) improves. There is a reason you essentially can't buy an SLC drive anymore. They just aren't necessary. MLC got better to the point where it could fill that role.
The question is, have we gotten to the point where TLC is really ready to supplant MLC in high write applications?
My old 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SATA drives I have been using as write cache for years are MLC and are rated at 150TBW each. At 69,000 power on hours, and 317110382829 LBA's (~147.6 TB) written they are both listed at a wear leveling count of 30%, so they are starting to get close. (well, I mean, if 70% wear came in 69000 hours, that means I have ~30,000 hours or 3.5 years left, but I don't want to push it TOO far)
The aforementioned Inland Premium drives are Phison E12 TLC drives. The 512GB model (to keep it as close to an "apples to apples" comparison as possible) is rated at over 5x the write endurance, at 780TBW.
If these numbers are accurate, and measured the same way Samsung did on my old 850 Pro's, maybe MLC really is no longer needed? I mean those old MLC 850 Pro's are going to give me a projected final lifespan of 11.25 years in my high write environment. If the Inland Premiums truly get 5.2x longer life, that should give me 58.5 years. I don't know if I'll be around in 2080 (probably not unless we see some amazing medical progress!), but I feel like I know for sure that at least my current server build will be long obsolete...
Any thoughts? What are you using that is this side of affordable. (I mean if budgets were unlimited, I'd just put Optanes in everything