3.84 TB SSD Advice

[nweav03]

Hi,

I've been reading a lot of the reviews here, storagereview, and the usuals. What I'm struggling to do is compare things like the Samsung 863 / Samsung 863a with say a WD red SSD or an ironwolf 110, or the qvos etc. I know that these are all different use cases, and this is more for a home lab than anything too fanciful, but I do want to deploy applications and database that will reside on a set of these so i'm thinking older enterprise is the way to go (having trouble confirming that). Does anyone have some advice here? Other than that i'm having some trouble figuring out what a good price to pay is, it looks like i can get a set of 863s for maybe $350-$375, but would it be worth it to update a little to say a SAS SSD like an old PS05 or PS04 (my backplane is a SAS backplane so it can handle either) which seem to be harder to come by and are more like $400-$450 each. A lot of my troubles are just comparing older enterprise drives that I can get for cheap that are 3-5 years old with newer, but non-enterprise grade drives.

I'm planning on building a pair of 12 drive raid-z2 arrays (might do a bit more research on that before I commit) for my lab, since my backplane is actually two independent ones so I can separate them to complicate my setup a bit and learn more about what I'm messing with.

I also intend long term to use these as a standard NAS as well while I'm at it since it seems opportune to do all this at once.

Any advice would be appreciated, If this isn't the right place to ask please let me know and I will correct it as soon as I can.

Thanks

 

[Evan]

PM863 are solid, certainly much better than consumer SSD, micron and Intel are other options but not much in the way of intel high capacity drives around.
SAS are usually cheaper and good drives with heaps of options but if you don’t have an adapter I would stick to sata and NVMe to keep it simple.

 

[Quartermaster]

One thing to be wary of, the PM863 had numerous firmware bugs which were patched along the way. The firmware files are not available to the public, and vendor branded drives can be a PITA to flash outside of their intended boxes.

I've gone full Micron for my 'criticial' workloads, they might be a little slower, but I know I can get firmware for them easily. Intel are also great and supply firmware publicly (and reportedly have great RMA processes) but they often command a steep premium over other brands.

 

[nweav03]

I just read about that in that Samsung 174x thread. It occurred to me that the vendors might try some kind of lock in (worked in the industry too long to not expect that). Have to admit, I'm probably going for Intel dc-s4500s because of that. I'm usually confident of messing with stuff if it's a couple hundred dollars at risk. 24 of whatever these ssds are will be 8-10 grand. I'm not really comfortable eating that if I mess up.

 

[Quartermaster]

Yep, I have 8x 3.84T PM863 drives I don't 'trust' anymore until I can find a way to get newer firmware for them. One of the nasty FW bugs is losing the entire drive in the event of power loss. Drive based PLP & controller cache BBU won't help in that situation!

 

[KCserve]

Thanks for the thread @nweav03 - I'm also looking

Needing qty 7-10 3.84TB SSD -

Thinking it's coming down to sata(sigh) Intel 4510 vs sata PM863a

anybody want to push me over the edge one way or another? seems to be down to those 2 for < $400 listings in qty on ebay right now.

Thanks!