Micron M500DC

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
Hi,
I`m on the way to buy a larger qty of them.

The intended usage is VM-Images/Volumes in a 3-Node Proxmox Cluster, 4-6 Drives / Chassis.
I`d use Gluster via RDMA, either on the Volumes or over ZFS.

As there was some discussion about crucial/micron power-loss protection i made some research.
According to this document they should have full power-loss protection, including the DRAM:

https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/white-paper/wp_ssd_power_loss_protection.pdf

Regarding what i found on performance / endurance / consistency those look ok, also due to a massive amount of over-provisioning.

Anyone has any (bad) experience that would keep me from getting them for my setup ?
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
@_alex I suggest looking at independent performance tests and not just the specs if I recall these fell short.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
Hi,
i read some of them:

Micron M500DC 800 GB SSD Review: Cloud And Web 2.0 Storage - Bridging The Gap Between Consumer And Enterprise Storage
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-rev...ew-480gb-great-write-performance-great-price/

As i`m interested in the 240gb drivers i also found this measurement, what a german system-builder did with it`s own tool (TKperf):

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/tkmag/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Micron-M500DC-240GB.pdf

For me this looks all quite ok for the price they go currently. I just need way more IOPS in Gluster than i can get from my spinning drives atm, but not tons of TB`s.

Would use the SSD Storage only for VM`s that really need it, the others can stay on capacity drives.
 

Patriot

Moderator
Apr 18, 2011
1,450
789
113
@_alex I think what @T_Minus is trying to convey is that a number of people here have removed these from VM workloads due to latency issues.
They are decent enough read drives but if you are expecting consistent writes then you should go look at anandtechs benches... or anyone that tests drives for longer than 60 seconds... as the guy in that link does.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
Hi Patriot,
i also read the anandtech benches and didn't find w hint for latency-issues, also over time.

But, to be honest, Interpretation of SSD-benchmarks might not be my strength, what is also why i asked here.

what i'm looking for is not High-end best of breed Performance like pci-e SSD's and nvme would deliver but solid enough to run i.e. MySQL, LDAP, Influxdb or Solr Data-Volumes, each assisted by a decent amount of RAM in the vm, on it.

My baseline is a gluster-Volume of SATA-Drives whith it's Limits where i want to get those Data-Volumes off for lower latency / faster Transaktions.

So, if there is a really good reason those drives wouldn't fit at all for such workloads i would appreciate if someone could point on it ;)
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
@Patriot is right I recalled a # of people complaining about latency.

@_alex As I had some time I went and googled it some more and it looks like they released a patch/firmware that cut latency #s... but I'm still not sure if people had problems after that or not, @Patriot may know the answer to that.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
yes, i also found that there were issues with the sqlserver OLTP workload that have been resolved with a Firmware Update.

I just Ordered a Bunch and will see what i get out of them in different configurations.

Price is so nice i should be able to sell them without big loss when it comes worst.

On eBay the 240gb go for USD 69,69 new - this is, incl. shipping and customs, what a Consumer drive without caps and that Hube amount of overprovissioning would cost, too.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
haha, i saw them disappearing while waiting for a reply from the seller - guess yours will arrive way faster than mine.

I bought a lot of 25, just in Case.
18 for my 3 nodes Cluster currently in built, the others for Lab and Self-RMA.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
I can't find more recent review/test of latency but it seems that some of the tests I saw showed the latency graph from 1 to 100 (ms) where the Intel S3700 latency graph was 1 to 10 and this iirc was on reads not writes.

The rest of the tests seem to show latency similar to S3500.

Latency doesn't look too bad, I made the below image to compare... consistency is def. an issue it's up and down, but overall it's not bad looking. Then again we're comparing a $70 240gb to an Intel S3700 200GB that most often cost $120-175 too.

Micron M510DC (480GB) Enterprise SATA SSD Review (Link says M510 but you can view M500)

ssd-compare.jpg

I was declined an offer on 28 (24x pool w/spares) for testing @50/each so I just got a few to test with my own workloads, and simulations to see how they do. At this point though I'm not really spending much on SSD for performance only capacity and the 1-off home server for friends/family...
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
Ah, didn't look at this one as it was for the 510.
If the 240GB Drives do not perform much different from the tested 480GB that`s absolutely ok.

On the spikes, i saw they mostly are above the values Micron has in their specs, so should be no reason to complain.
i.e. 33k iops random write in the specs, spikes to nearly 45k iops, but none below 33k

In total for me it looks like the Microns are within a wider band in terms of consistency than the S3700 which nearly shows a line.
 

Patriot

Moderator
Apr 18, 2011
1,450
789
113
Smaller capacities almost always perform worse due to less nand packages. OP the drives 20-50% should help with the shiite performance. The problem is less with the normal operation and more with the operation during garbage collection. So long as the gc doesn't engage while you are actively using it your performance should be okish.

Micron's past fw updates simply kicked the gc down the road keeping it from engaging during benches... didn't solve the problem just hid it.

#1 OP the hell out of it so it has plenty of space to swap the partition around to.

#2 Don't write to it continuously without breaks

#3 Make sure the partition is aligned and don't do odd block sized writes.

#4 ????

#5 Profit/Don't hate yourself forever.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
866
97
28
Bavaria / Germany
@Patriot: lol - ok ... will see how the services that use volumes on the drives perform, if that is fine / a significant improvement to current situation everything is ok.

In the end i fear there are other sources for latency in my setup that are magnitudes larger than those these disks could have :/

Won't have permanent heavy writes, so i`m still confident.

The note with the fw updates is interesting. Some of those benchmarks were running around 6hrs. Sound's a bit strange to kick-out gc in total for that period.