Need ssd recomendation

[nandEater]

I want an SSD for running my virtual machines. I have a Core Ultra 265K and a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB as my boot drive.

I’ve been looking at some used enterprise U.2 drives on eBay, specifically the Intel P4610 1.6TB NVMe drives, which are selling for around $110 USD.

However, with an idle power draw of about 5W, the electricity cost could add up, especially since power here is $0.35 per kWh.

Would I be better off just buying consumer NVMe drives instead? I have three additional M.2 slots available on my motherboard.

If I go with U.2 drives, I’d need to get a PCIe adapter card.

 

[nexox]

If you want enterprise features with low power you're pretty much stuck with SATA, even aside from the 5W idle I don't think I have heard of a U.2 drive which supports ASPM, so your CPU idle power will go up too. If you need an adapter card with a PCIe switch that's another 5-10W idle power.

 

[name stolen]

I used an Optane 905P in a PCIE slot for VMs for a couple of years, and then realized I had written less than 10TB to that drive, so just swapped it for something Gen4, larger (capacity), and smaller (physically - m.2). I didn't feel like the power draw was worth the endurance, once I had purchased the endurance. Another 990 PRO would probably fit the bill just fine, or P41 Platinum, or SN850X, or any of the newer Gen5 alternatives (SN8100 etc) ((PS. I also have some 4610s and 4600s - just as hot and power-hungry as 905P. I don't think there is ANY situation where I would use them in a desktop again.))

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

This largely depends on your IO and redundancy requirements and there's no perfect sweet spots - I use enterprise SATA because I don't need squillions of IOPS and/or multi-GB/s sequential transfers. My Micron 5x00's idle at around 1-2W idle and maybe 3-4W peak which makes them very lean compared to enterprise PCIe, and the array still provides me with way more IOPS than I can realistically use.

Consumer SSDs isn't perfect either (although usually still much less power hungry than enterprise) - if your VMs chew enough IO to be always writing something, you'll forever be chewing your pSLC and performance will be sluggish; enterprise-rated drives tend to have much better "steady state" performance. There's also a fair amount of consumer M.2 drives that have negligible power savings when ASPM is enabled - one of TPUs recent reviews gives a good example (although usually still considerably less than enterprise drives).

The eternal bugbear of M.2's lack of hot-swap for RAID replacement is a massive PITA as far as I'm concerned, but it sounds like you're going to be running yours from a desktop rather than a server so presumably downtime's not so much of a problem for you.

An M.2 -> U.2 direct adapter should be passive (it's just PCIe passthrough basically) so shouldn't have onerous power requirements.

 

[JustinFletcher]

This largely depends on your IO and redundancy requirements and there's no perfect sweet spots - I use enterprise SATA because I don't need squillions of IOPS and/or multi-GB/s sequential transfers. My Micron 5x00's idle at around 1-2W idle and maybe 3-4W peak which makes them very lean compared to enterprise PCIe, and the array still provides me with way more IOPS than I can realistically use.

Consumer SSDs isn't perfect either (although usually still much less power hungry than enterprise) - if your VMs chew enough IO to be always writing something, you'll forever be chewing your pSLC and performance will be sluggish; enterprise-rated drives tend to have much better "steady state" performance. There's also a fair amount of consumer M.2 drives that have negligible power savings when ASPM is enabled - one of TPUs recent reviews gives a good example (although usually still considerably less than enterprise drives).

The eternal bugbear of M.2's lack of hot-swap for RAID replacement is a massive PITA as far as I'm concerned, but it sounds like you're going to be running yours from a desktop rather than a server so presumably downtime's not so much of a problem for you.

An M.2 -> U.2 direct adapter should be passive (it's just PCIe passthrough basically) so shouldn't have onerous power requirements.

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[mattventura]

I have found a few U.2 drives that seem to support ASPM. My SN100 has L0s and L1, and Intel DC P4510 has L0s.

There's also a fair amount of consumer M.2 drives that have negligible power savings when ASPM is enabled - one of TPUs recent reviews gives a good example (although usually still considerably less than enterprise drives).

It's true that ASPM doesn't reduce the power savings on the drive by all that much, but on most systems, you need ASPM in order for the CPU package to enter deeper sleep states like C6. If you don't have ASPM, the increase in idle power consumption by the CPU can more than the drive itself might use.

 

[nandEater]

I bought some 800gb intel S3610 they have an idle power of 600mw.

 

[richardm]

The Intel P4510 and P4511 were marketed as low-power. The literature suggests 8.25 watts and I think (but cannot prove) some power tuning knobs are available via nvme-cli that might lower it.

 

[AndrewC11]

I want an SSD for running my virtual machines. I have a Core Ultra 265K and a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB as my boot drive.

I’ve been looking at some used enterprise U.2 drives on eBay, specifically the Intel P4610 1.6TB NVMe drives, which are selling for around $110 USD.

However, with an idle power draw of about 5W, the electricity cost could add up, especially since power here is $0.35 per kWh.

Would I be better off just buying consumer NVMe drives instead? I have three additional M.2 slots available on my motherboard.

If I go with U.2 drives, I’d need to get a PCIe adapter card.

This thread is a bit old, so I would lean even more towards consumer NVMe these days. SSD prices have come down significantly, and drives like the WD Black SN850X, Samsung 990 EVO Plus/990 Pro, or Solidigm P44 Pro are fast enough to handle multiple virtual machines.

The P4610 is still a great enterprise drive if you need its strengths—very high endurance, consistent performance under long, intensive writes, and protection against power loss—but those benefits aren't much of a consideration for a typical home virtualization lab. The 5W standby power is also a factor: at $0.35/kWh, that's about $15/year just for idle, not including any additional power from the PCIe adapter.

Since you already have M.2 slots available, I would avoid the added complexity of U.2 unless you specifically need enterprise features. For most desktop VM workloads, a good consumer NVMe with TLC is a simpler and more cost-effective choice. It's important to me that everything works cleanly and simply, and I use this same principle at https://mostbetbd.asia/.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

SSD prices have come down a lot

Possibly this is a geographical thing... but where/when have SSD prices gone down?! Pretty much everywhere I look almost nothing is in stock, and when it is it's at least double, and more usually triple, the price it was last year.

I know it's not a "real" price, but my usual etailer has the Micron 480GB 7450 for a mere £130,000 currently

 

[nexox]

a good TLC consumer NVMe is the simpler and more cost-effective choice.

I have trouble finding benchmarks with sync writes for these sorts of drives but my experience with pretty good industrial TLC drives is that it tanks performance when the workload syncs too much and with multiple VMs running their own filesystems, which tend to sync metadata at least, you kinda want real PLP to maintain write throughput (and of course to avoid the data loss that I get to contend with frequently, because only the filesystem metadata is journaled and sync'd.)

I have a PM9A1 TLC drive in my work laptop and even with lots of spare/discarded space it will slow to ~3.5MB/s sequential write speed if I accidentally leave sync writes on for NFS shares (async starts to get CPU bottlenecked but does around 500MB/s to the SSD.)