Black Friday Deals - Buy or Wait?

[Maca]

Hello All,

Quick question - perhaps. I'm thinking about upgrading my existing server to a Xeon E5v3 machine (home build) as my existing E3v2 build with a 32GB RAM cap is a bottleneck for my lab. For storage it has a 3tb x 6 RAIDZ2 array and a single 1tb EVO SSD I bought about a year ago to improve VM performance. The SSD has held me over even though I know it's not a proper drive for the purpose, but it is just a home lab.

Since black friday deals are happening I see that newegg.ca is offering the same 1tb EVO SSD for $180 CAD which is pretty attractive. I was thinking of grabbing one and running a ZFS stripe (RAID0) to further improve performance while I try to convince my wife that upgrading the server is a "good" idea. Obviously backups would be done frequently as this is a risky setup.

Think this is worth the effort or should I just wait, upgrade the server and see what comes up down the road for Optane drives?

Thanks!

 

[Maca]

Nothing?

There also appear to be some deals on newer NVMe drives popping up; I suppose these are probably more worthy of consideration?

Thanks,

 

[T_Minus]

Consumer SSD will be the slow point of your server, get an enterprise ssd, or enterprise nvme from intel and be happy

If you search the forums for enterprise vs consumer etc, you'll get TONS of info.

Don't rely on charts or graphs from enterprise consumer sales material as they only test on small amount of data vs. continuous or whole drive.

You could look at Tomshardware for the 970 EVO steady-state performance then look at something like Intel P3700 steady state, or even Intel S3710 steady state to get ideas of what I'm talking about. I haven't tried with the 970 but other consumer drives don't have the firmware\gc for on-oging usage so some once they slow down will never speed up until they're removed, erased, re-loaded etc...


Optane drives will be > than all really if oyu can handle the cost and space constraints

 

[Dawg10]

the same 1tb EVO SSD for $180 CAD which is pretty attractive.

Picked up 4 of these at $169 each from newegg.ca/ebay earlier this week; they moved 100 units in a few hours then marked the listing sold and raised the price. Free shipping; received them yesterday.

SAMSUNG 860 EVO Series 2.5" 1TB SATA III V-NAND 3-bit MLC Internal Solid State D | eBay

 

[zkrr01]

I would advise to always buy the pro verses the evo series. The pro version will run at the rated speed. The EVO will run a few seconds at the rated speed and then slow down a lot. The pro version will cost more, but the performance is well worth the extra cost. And the crap about the enterprise is so much better than the consumer version is just that, crap.

 

[i386]

The pro version will cost more, but the performance is well worth the extra cost. And the crap about the enterprise is so much better than the consumer version is just that, crap.

Do you have 970 pros?
Can you run diskspd with the following command and post the result?

diskspd -b4K -c20G -d120 -L -o8 -r -Sh -t4 -w20 testfile.dat

 

[T_Minus]

P3700 (Enterprise) Steady State --> https://www.storagereview.com/images/intel_2_5inch_p3700_2tb_preconditioning_4kwrite_throughput.png

970 EVO (Consumer) Steady State --> TweakTown.com Enlarged Image
(The 960 PRO dropped to around 50k like the evo then worked up to about 90k. No 970 Pro on that test.)


For those who don't want to click the P3700 stays at > 160,000 IOPs while the Samsung drops to about 60,000.

In addition to that, the Samsung max during the same test was around 250,000 the intel is at 400,000.


If you don't need much storage space right now it's clear choice, go Optane

 

[zkrr01]

I agree with T_Minus, use Optane if you don't need much storage space.

 

[Maca]

T_Minus,

I see you've listed the P3700; is that an Optane drive? When I think Optane I think the drives I see on Newegg listed as Optane.

Thanks,

 

[T_Minus]

T_Minus,

I see you've listed the P3700; is that an Optane drive? When I think Optane I think the drives I see on Newegg listed as Optane.

Thanks,

No.

 

[Maca]

Alright, well I'll cross my fingers some Optane stuff goes on sale on Newegg then I suppose.

 

[Joel]

Big thing about consumer vs Enterprise is PLP (power loss protection), especially in a ZFS environment. Yeah I know, you're thinking "But I have an UPS! I don't need PLP!"

Doesn't matter.

ZFS doesn't consider the data safe until it is committed to disk. In a PLP environment the SSD reports the data safe as soon as it hits the super fast DRAM cache. If the drive does not have PLP, that doesn't happen until the data is committed to the NVRAM, which is an order of magnitude slower.