SSD availability solution for office PC

[alex_stief]

In the spirit of the season, I need some advice on how to sanitize the storage configuration of my parents office PC.
Until now they have two 1TB HDDs in RAID1 inside the PC plus a RAID1 on a NAS in a slightly remote location for nightly backups. Set up by their local IT guy.
Since the PC is pretty old (actually slow as f***) and I figuered out their workload is surprisingly IO-heavy with large databases I think it is time for a new setup with SSD storage. While keeping the NAS for backups.
Cost is not that much of an issue here, loosing a days work or not being able to access the PC for a few hours would be a real issue since they are running an actual business from home. So in theory, a raided SSD storage could be a solution. Reading through some recommendations, I got the impression that RAID (especially RAID1) with consumer SSDs is not necessarily a good idea. Arguments brought up are missing TRIM support on raided SSDs and the chance of corrupt data from a failing SSD being mirrored to the good SSD in a RAID1.

tl;dr
I need ~1-2TB of SSD storage for an office PC with high availability. A nightly backup to a NAS is already established.

 

[azev]

I'd recommend that you'd get any intel datacenter SSD sata product, or better yet get any intel NVME drive for super performance.

 

[nk215]

If you over-provision then GC alone is adequate. A pair of 2TB consumer SSD over-provisioned to 1TB in mirrored setup (1TB usable space) will most likely give you trouble-free service for 10s of years to come.

 

[alex_stief]

So the two issues I read about -missing TRIM and RAID1 being not recommended for SSDs- are are actually not a thing?

 

[Evan]

The issue I guess for raid1 is the logic that 2 identical drives may have identical wear and fail at the same time, reality is that won’t happen (butterfly effect)

As for TRIM, that really about the operating system that this space is free so can be re-used, the ssd should do garbage collection anyway but it’s slower. Over provisioning helps manage this issue greatly.

 

[nk215]

So the two issues I read about -missing TRIM and RAID1 being not recommended for SSDs- are are actually not a thing?

It's only one issue (not 2): In RAID1, TRIM does not work. Basically, the SSD will slow down eventually in RAID1 setup. Over-provision is a way to get around the issue.

Even with a slowest of a RAID1 SSD setup, you are still significantly faster than the fastest spinner setup especially when it comes to random access.

 

[azev]

Actually it depend, I think I read somewhere if you use your built in onboard intel controller and driver trim will be supported.
Since the pc is old this may not be the case. Nonetheless, with enterprise ssd, you dont really need trim, it has a much better garbage collection process that should not impact performance.

 

[alex_stief]

I assume over-provisioning works by putting a smaller partition on the drive and leaving the rest unformatted?
So the next question is: ECC or not to ECC?
An Intel I3-8100 looks like a pretty compelling option for an office-PC, but only if ECC is not needed.

 

[Evan]

I assume over-provisioning works by putting a smaller partition on the drive and leaving the rest unformatted?
So the next question is: ECC or not to ECC?
An Intel I3-8100 looks like a pretty compelling option for an office-PC, but only if ECC is not needed.

I3’s unlike i5/i7 supports ECC in a board that supports it. (Yes even the latest quad core i3’s support)

 

[alex_stief]

Which ECC-capable motherboard supports a coffee-lake CPU?
For consumer-boards you needed a new board to get compatibility with coffee-lake, the older 200series chipset was locked by Intel.

 

[Evan]

Which ECC-capable motherboard supports a coffee-lake CPU?
For consumer-boards you needed a new board to get compatibility with coffee-lake, the older 200series chipset was locked by Intel.

Fair point, at least supermicro does not appear to have one yet... I am sure it will come though, who would not want to use 4-cores i3’s as small server platform, i Would think it’s just a matter of time.

 

[alex_stief]

Unfortunately, I can't wait until Intel and its partners decide to release new motherboards. I haven't even heard of any announcements.
I guess I am dropping ECC

 

[nk215]

I would look into a generation old E3 Xeon rather than a current i3. There's no particular performance reason, it's just that I trust Xeon (enterprise equipment in general) more than desktop/workstation counter part.

Unless the computer is built for: medical research/tasks, games, video editing/rendering tasks, CAD, FEA jobs, multi-user server, it's hard to exceed CPU power a CPU 1 or 2 generation old.

 

[alex_stief]

As far as the CPUs themselves are concerned, I am pretty confident that there is no difference in reliability. In one generation, they are all the same chips anyway, only with different features enabled or disabled.
Or are you trying to tell me that I should get a Xeon E5? The only thing that separates the CPUs in terms of reliability is ECC memory. The rest is marketing.

 

[Evan]

The cpu supports ECC, it’s the board that does not. Yes I would say the cpu is identical but a generation old E3 supports hyper threading and will use same power etc.

To me completely irreverent, workstations for the most part don’t need ECC, not that it hurts to have it but I would hardly consider it a must have feature unless your in a very narrow field of work where ECC would be actually needed.

Bang for buck the gen8 i3’s should be great.

PS, a lot of us have Xeon E5 workstations but that’s because we are using old enterprise equipment and can use the cores and it’s cheap.

 

[alex_stief]

PS, a lot of us have Xeon E5 workstations but that’s because we are using old enterprise equipment and can use the cores and it’s cheap.

Me too

I will go with two Micron 1100 2GB 2.5" SATA drives. They might not be the best consumer SSDs on the market, but thanks to their good value (450€ each) I can actually afford redundancy with RAID1 and over-provisioning.
My reasoning is that two cheap redundant drives with an imaginary annual failure rate of 2% each are still more secure than a single enterprise drive with 0.1% annual failure rate.

 

[alex_stief]

Say I want to mirror the old system to the new one...how would you recommend tackling this?
The old system consists of two partitions on the HDD RAID1. So I can't just take them out and plug them into the new system to mirror with Clonezilla. Same problem for the other way round. The only solution I can think of is mirroring the old system to an auxiliary disk (hoping that Clonezilla finds the raided disk), putting the auxiliary disk in the new system and mirror it to the new SSD RAID1, again hoping that clonezilla finds the RAID array. I had issues with clonezilla being unable to find disks on some controllers in the past, hence my skepticism.
Any better ideas besides setting up the system from scratch? The manual of the new motherboard is not particularly helpful when it comes to the options available for setting up RAID. For example if it is possible to create a RAID1 while keeping the data stored on one of the disks.