Samsung 850 Evo's

[5teve]

Hi Guys

Just trying to find a decent boot / system drive for my upcoming system (now the motherboard is finally in the country!) I was wanting 2 SSD's in raid (will expand and ask questions shortly)

I have been looking around for some decent used Enterprise drives but they are few and far between in Aus (and twice the price at least compared to the US) however I have the chance at some Samsung 850 evos at a 'reasonable' cost and was wondering what your thoughts are on these drives. They will be hooked up to an intel chipset (motherboard ports on the Asrockrack c226ws board) do they have any powerloss protection too?

I am also looking for opinions on Raid for system / boot drives - I have always had my spinners in raid 1 for a bit of redundancy, however with the apparent reliability of SSD's, would it be feasible to go raid 0 to get additional speed as I do photo / video editing a lot and think (but am open to being wrong) that I would benefit - The system is imaged nightly to a freenas box... so redundancy is really only to save me restoring the system if anything goes wrong..

Storage locally on the machine is a raid 6 of 8 2tb hitachi ultrastars. so the SSD's are only boot / system / temp

Your thoughts and wisdom would be greatly appreciated..

Steve

 

[Patrick]

The Samsung 850 EVOs I am not a huge fan of on LSI / Avago controllers. On Intel PCH and for the stated application they are great. If you are even considering RAID 0 you probably do not need power loss protection. The 850 EVO is a value drive and thus will not have PLP.

 

[katit]

Patric, there is great deal going on right now for 850 EVO's in 512Gb. I was going to get those for RAID1 on LSI card for ESXi. Looks like it's not very good options? Will Crucial M500 be better?

 

[Deci]

If you do want more business/enterprise aimed drives in AU, Computer and Laptop RAM, Memory, SSD Upgrades for Dell, HP, Apple and Mac - RamCity are a reasonable source but not always the best priced.

 

[Patrick]

Patric, there is great deal going on right now for 850 EVO's in 512Gb. I was going to get those for RAID1 on LSI card for ESXi. Looks like it's not very good options? Will Crucial M500 be better?

Probably OK, but do benchmark them on the controller. I have seen a few issues but generally I can resolve them. At this point the Samsung 850 EVO > M500

 

[katit]

What kind of issues? If I get them - I won't be able to return, Need to know they will work fine on 9260-8i

 

[5teve]

Ok so based on some reviews I ended up going for a pair of 240gb sandisk extreme pro drives. Apparently very fast, very consistent performance and only a bit more than the 850 evo and a lot less than the 850 pro.

Now I just need to decide on mirror or stripe!

Steve

 

[Deci]

Stripe if you dont mind rebuilding/imaging it if one dies, mirror if you do.

About all it comes down to, you already said you take a daily backup so data retention which is the main issue with raid-0 is less of an issue.