ESXi 7.0: 983 DCT or 970 EVO Plus? Or then what is a good NVMe SSD for homelab?

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hmw

Active Member
Apr 29, 2019
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I have a Tyan S8030 motherboard with 2 NVMe 22110 slots that I will be using for an ESXi 7.0 homelab. I was thinking of putting a NVMe drive for the ESXi 7.0 boot partition + one of the data stores. Would the 970 Evo Plus 1TB be a good idea? Or would it be better to put something like a 983 DCT 960GB? The 983DCT has Power Loss Protection, and I've heard that ESXi can be quirky with NVMe support, so the thinking was that it would be better to go for a known enterprise level SSD with good endurance (the 983 endurance is 0.8 DWPD as opposed to 0.3 DWPD for the Evo Plus)

The other drives that are cheap and have the same kind of endurance are the Corsair MP510 - allegedly 1700TBW endurance. However, the MP510 has had issues with AMD IOMMU and TRIM and in fact there's indications that it doesn't support TRIM under Linux for example

What NVMe SSDs are folks using for their ESXi 7 labs?
 

vangoose

Active Member
May 21, 2019
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I use 970 pro. Endurance isn’t a concern since I only run 3 vms on it. I have tons of enterprise ssd or none, after a few years they only wrote less than 100tb and have 100% life.

its on epic platform.
 

hmw

Active Member
Apr 29, 2019
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That's good to hear. So now my choices are:
  1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB
  2. Samsung 970 Pro 1TB
  3. Intel P4510 1TB

As an aside - I see 'new & sealed' Intel P4510 1TB U.2/15mm drives on eBay for $200. The Samsung drives are costlier at $250 and $350. Might just take a chance on the Intel drives :)
 

SRussell

Active Member
Oct 7, 2019
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I honestly doubt you will be able to notice the difference in performance from any of the drives.
 

zer0sum

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2013
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I use 970 pro. Endurance isn’t a concern since I only run 3 vms on it. I have tons of enterprise ssd or none, after a few years they only wrote less than 100tb and have 100% life.

its on epic platform.
@vangoose - Is that 970 pro working with ESXi 7.0?

Since I've upgraded, I've found my Intel 660P drives work perfectly, but I have an Adata SX8200 and a HP EX920 that won't work with ESXi 7.0 :(