p3700 2tb for $599 @ ebay Refurb

[ServerSemi]

Or best offer.

Seems like a good deal?

A8047089 Intel DC P3700 Series 2TB SSD PCIe 3.0 NVMe Solid State Drive 57GV2 | eBay

 

[e97]

Ark: Intel® SSD DC P3700 Series (2.0TB, 1/2 Height PCIe 3.0, 20nm, MLC) Product Specifications

Launch date: Q2'14

500GB Samsung 970 EVO for $117 x 4 = about $468 and its faster

 

[Evan]

@e97 granted cheaper but add a card to mount them on and a board with PCIe bifurcation support to drive it, then raid...

An Intel DC drive is much more reliable I am sure.
And performant under heavy load.

 

[e97]

Quad x16 NVMe card is $199 or two dual x8 for less than $100.

970 EVO reliability and performance under load has been superb. A 3+ year old controller and flash is likely not going to be as reliable or fast under load.

Only way to know is to do you own testing.

If you are limited on number of PCIe slots this could be great.

 

[Evan]

I don’t have any info on the 970 EVO on my workload but I assume they will choke on sustained load, anyway home use your point is generally valid I would think but with that in mind I would accept the less performance and just go straight to a 2TB 970, more useful than 4 x 500G in nearly every way I think.

 

[muhfugen]

970 EVO reliability and performance under load has been superb. A 3+ year old controller and flash is likely not going to be as reliable or fast under load.

There is far more than that when it comes to SSDs. Enterprise class SSDs including the P3700 often have power loss protection so you wont lose data if your power goes out, or if you have to power cycle your computer because it became unresponsive. The 970 EVO has a 2GB RAM cache (for the 2TB model), that is a lot of data you can lose. They have orders of magnitude better rates of unrecoverable errors, the P3700 has 10^17 bits per URE, consumer disks are generally 10^14, the 970 EVO doesn't list its URE rate on the datasheet so it probably comparable to other consumer disks. And far better rated endurance 36.5PB for the P3700, only 1.2PB for the 970 EVO for the 2TB model (even less for smaller ones). There is a good reason why enterprise class disks cost several times their consumer counterparts.

500GB Samsung 970 EVO for $117 x 4 = about $468 and its faster

That may be, but I just picked up 3 HGST SN200 800GB disks for $250 each, and 24 Seagate 600 Pro 480GB disks for about $75 each for a VSAN and S2D/SOFS home lab, for the previously mentioned reasons rather than buying entry level consumer disks even if they may offer better performance. At the end of the day the question is what is more important, data integrity, or performance.

 

[BackupProphet]

PLP is not exactly about losing data, it makes it possible to write fast to a buffer. In the early days most SSD's didn't honor fsync so you could get data corruption, but today most SSD's do honor fsync. Including Samsung 970 EVO. Though the difference in fsync performance between Samsung 970 EVO and Intel P3700 is 100x-1000x.

 

[i386]

PLP is not exactly about losing data, it makes it possible to write fast to a buffer.

Writing to dram is always fast.
The question is does your ssd protect that dram (enterprise grade ssd) or not (consumer ssd)?

 

[BackupProphet]

When you do synchronous writes, you do that because you need the safety. Nothing bad will happen. The only exception are some few SSD's (especially older) that don't honor the ATA_FLUSH_CACHE command.

 

[T_Minus]

Quad x16 NVMe card is $199 or two dual x8 for less than $100.

970 EVO reliability and performance under load has been superb. A 3+ year old controller and flash is likely not going to be as reliable or fast under load.

Only way to know is to do you own testing.

If you are limited on number of PCIe slots this could be great.

It may appear that way but the Intel is a faster, better drive.

 

[e97]

as always, benchmark for your use case - preferably with accurate test sample

I've encountered this older enterprise vs newer consumer tech a few times now. it can go either way.

it works great for my ai/ml datasets and I have bbu so I'm not concerned about power loss. zfs is also nice

if it doesnt work for you then enjoy your intel enterprise ssds. more for you folks ;p

p.s. y'all a bunch of addicts defending your "hobby"

 

[Patrick]

@e97 just as a bit of background on why a battery back up is not PLP:
https://www.servethehome.com/what-is-the-zfs-zil-slog-and-what-makes-a-good-one/

Also, inside a server, a power event can occur between your BBU and the drive if a PSU fails or a capacitor on the motherboard dies.

For read optimized workloads, the consumer drives are great. The P3700's are good for transactional databases and write caches. They are also extremely reliable in servers.

 

[e97]

Good read!

Necessary for safe writes for production db's, not so much for reads (my use case).

Also depends on your BBU architecture - I'm using a DC BBU on the server like Google's original servers

 

[Patrick]

If you talk to the storage reliability guys at the big vendors, they always point to the fact that any BBU still needs to push power through the motherboard/ internal wiring. For our purposes, less exciting, but for the folks who may find this thread via search, BBUs to not obviate the need for PLP on SSDs to achieve high sync write speeds.

 

[e97]

The Google-y style BBU is parallel with AC-DC PSU so 12V DC directly to components and step-down distribution for 5v, 3.3v. Its like having a big capacitor on all your components for 1min of backup power that's truly uninterruptible; less than a 1ms switchover.

I like to hack and innovate R&D style.

The big vendors like to to vend you stuff.

If you need it now, mission critical/battle tested, someone else on the hook if it fails - go with the big vendors and the <1hr mission critical support packages which are fking awesome. Nothing beats 1hr instant replacement on hw issues.

I would definitely NOT recommend my setup for mission critical stuff with out some serious battle testing. I'm thinking for my fellow servertheHOME folks.

Whose running a production db in their house and if so what for, please share?

 

[gigatexal]

So back to the thread’s purpose: how is this not a scam? This is a screaming good amount of really fast storage for cheap, too cheap imo

 

[T_Minus]

So back to the thread’s purpose: how is this not a scam? This is a screaming good amount of really fast storage for cheap, too cheap imo

These tanked in price a few months ago.

NewEgg has NIB 800GB for $399 even.


It's rather amazing the performance : $ now on storage.

 

[dbTH]

So back to the thread’s purpose: how is this not a scam? This is a screaming good amount of really fast storage for cheap, too cheap imo

I don't think this a scam. But did you guys notice the wear level of the drives that the seller listed? About 95% life left. Should these drives still have over 99% life left, they would be great deal at $599 price point. If you try a little harder, you could get a branded new 1.6TB P3700 with warranty under $599. Also, Intel DC P3700 has been discontinued, so these drives were probably coming out from servers that had been decommissioned.

 

[oddball]

To pile onto the EVO 970 vs 3700...the 3700’s average latency is 20us, the 970 is 120us. So while it can read more faster, technically it is 6x slower.

This matters when queue depth starts to jump. What we found was with 970s we still had queue depths of 5-8 with SQL Server workloads. We moved to an Optane and P3560 (a comparatively slow drive, but latency of 30us) and queue depths vanished. Same workloads, response time is much better. The latency drop was enough to clear the queues.

The sizable reads/writes are really only important if this is for digital editing or bulk storage. Otherwise you are probably doing a lot of random reads and writes.

 

[gigatexal]

I don't think this a scam. But did you guys notice the wear level of the drives that the seller listed? About 95% life left. Should these drives still have over 99% life left, they would be great deal at $599 price point. If you try a little harder, you could get a branded new 1.6TB P3700 with warranty under $599. Also, Intel DC P3700 has been discontinued, so these drives were probably coming out from servers that had been decommissioned.

95% of life at a lifetime of 35PB of writes is something like 1.75 PB of writes or so. Totally fine for me. Since my usecase would be very much read biased and I’d be unlikely to hit the lifetime write threshold anytime soon and I’d rather have the space than anything else.