STEC ZeusRAM 8GB

[AlphaG]

STEC ZEUSRAM "Zeus RAM" 8GB Z4RZF3D-8UC SSD "RAM Drive" | eBay

Pretty sure I don’t need this and maybe NVMe tech makes this less important, but I picked up one of these for my freeNAS box to use as ZIL/SLOG. It was listed at $399 used and I offered $300, which was accepted just now. Seems like a decent deal if you need/want one. So you could maybe get it for a little less if you try.

As a side question, this is my first SAS device, so not sure how to hook it up. Can I just run it off of one of my three SAS controllers (Dell H310’s)? I’m guessing I need some sort of adapter to connect one of the ends of the breakout cables (8087 -> SATA for my spinners) to this drive. Hopefully I can get the adapter and drive into one of the hotswap bays somehow. My Supermicro server has the SATA backplane with 24 individual ports.

 

[Monoman]

get yourself a dual port cable. You get better speeds from it with this Zeus RAM drive

 

[Rand__]

Those sold around $200-250 a couple of months ago - and that was before Optane.
Not sure those are a good deal at that price tbh. But maybe obo is good...

 

[azev]

get yourself a dual port cable. You get better speeds from it with this Zeus RAM drive

I second this, but don't be surprised at the cost for these cables they usually go for almost $100 and very rare

 

[BackupProphet]

I would rather just get an Optane drive.

 

[AlphaG]

You guys make a very valid point. Considering the cable plus another HBA that I would need, it would be cheaper and easier to go NVMe with a small Optane pcie card.

 

[BackupProphet]

The smaller Optane drives are OK for a slog. But just ignore the slog and use the whole Optane 900P as storage. In my opinion, there is no longer need for a slog these days.

 

[trumee]

The smaller Optane drives are OK for a slog. But just ignore the slog and use the whole Optane 900P as storage. In my opinion, there is no longer need for a slog these days.

Without an SLOG, NFS is unusable.

 

[BackupProphet]

Not on a SSD/NVMe pool, if you use hard drives you can increase the block size for NFS, if that work for you though. If you run VM's on hard drives over NFS then yes I see your point. But you can still grab a cheap Intel 320 40GB that will be fast enough for that use case.

 

[gea]

Without an Slog you use the onpool ZIL for logging with distributed writes over the pool. This means that an Slog must be faster than a whole pool regarding low latency or write iops on small random writes to give improvements.

For a disk based pool and an Flash/Optane/Dram based Slog this is the case because they offer 10-500x more iops than a pooldisk with a much lower latency. If your pool is based on SSDs or NVMe this is not the case. In such a case use them without Slog as such a pool performs better than nearly every Slog. You only should care about the powerloss behaviour of the pool then. (or use a very fast Slog with PLP due this aspect). A ZeusRAM would not be good enough.

I have done some benchmarks of different pools (hd. ssd, nvme,Optane) with different slog devices (SSD, ZeusRAM, Intel DC 3700, Intel P 3610, Optane 32G, Optane 900P) where you can compare results. Not tested is the effect of steady write load when SSDs and traditional Flash performs slower over time while a a ZeusRAM or Optane should hold the performance as they do not require trim, garbage collection or erase regions prior write, see http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/optane_slog_pool_performane.pdf