Linux Workstation SSD: Consumer Gen4, or Enterprise Gen3 with PLP?

[RulerOf]

Hi folks,

I'm building a Linux workstation and trying to decide on what storage device to use for my Linux root disk. My motherboard supports 22110 devices, so I'm seriously considering getting a used datacenter Gen3 with PLP device, rather than a newer Gen4 consumer device.

I seem to lose about 1 GBps read and write with nearly any Gen3+PLP device based on marketing materials and the benchmarks I've seen.

Is PLP worth that reduction in storage bandwidth?

Thanks.

 

[i386]

If you need the security yes.

If you need the performance, not necessary.
The pcie 4.0 consumer ssds are lot better in sustained workloads compared to their older pcie 3.0 counterparts.
(I chose for my thinkpad a samsung 980 pro 1tb because it didn't drop performance while running a sql server reporting service report on a huge dataset for 20minutes )

 

[NateS]

Generally agreed with what i386 said.

What are you using your root drive for though? That is, do you have a separate fast data drive for your working dataset, and the root drive only handles booting the OS? Or is it the only drive in the system that does everything? If it's purely a boot drive, it doesn't matter, since booting is a low-queue-depth, fairly random access process that won't be able to take advantage of all that bandwidth anyway, so just get something cheap and reliable.

Otherwise, consider the cost of the downtime if your system fails. If, after a power outage, your system won't boot and you need to restore from backups, how big of a problem is that? If the downtime would cost you many thousands or millions, then it makes sense to spend the hundreds extra now to eliminate that risk. OTOH, if it would just be a minor inconvenience, then you can probably skip it. For homelab situations, I generally don't think it's that critical.

 

[RulerOf]

If you need the security yes.

If you need the performance, not necessary.
The pcie 4.0 consumer ssds are lot better in sustained workloads compared to their older pcie 3.0 counterparts.

To be clear, I'm only really worried about performance of sync writes. e.g. large docker/k8s/kvm local dev environments. Wondering out loud if I should expect to see tangible performance benefits with these applications. It's probably silly to cut typical performance in half just to speed up importing mysql dumps.

What are you using your root drive for though? That is, do you have a separate fast data drive for your working dataset, and the root drive only handles booting the OS? Or is it the only drive in the system that does everything?

This would be my drive for all of my workstation stuff. Dev VMs would be sitting on it as qcow files, and/or docker containers sharing the host kernel. I would back the system up to my storage server, and I have a consumer drive that I'll use for Windows VFIO-style.

then it makes sense to spend the hundreds extra now to eliminate that risk.

That's the thing, I'm seeing eBay prices for ~2000 MBps read ~1000 MBps write Gen3 PLP drives for about $100/T, and then the Gen4 drives of the same capacity are around $125/T. With prices being so similar and the only difference being about 1000 MBps read+write bandwidth, I'm wondering out loud if PLP would be worthwhile for my use case.