Was looking to pick up a couple of cheap vSAN drives and ran across these. Ended up picking up 2 for my AF robo cluster. $74 for a VSAN HCL listed 300GB drive (500R, 315W) shipped seemed like a good deal. Seller has more in stock.
US - eBay Intel DC S3500 300GB $74 free shipping
- Thread starter fishtacos
- Start date
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How many devices per VSAN node do you need to be performant if youre using drives with capacity like these? Would it be okay if I had 4 nodes with 2 drives each?
Also is it possible to use these as boot drives and use the unused space somehow in a converged setup? Or no.
Also is it possible to use these as boot drives and use the unused space somehow in a converged setup? Or no.
I bought 2 of these drives from this seller. I offered $55 each, and he countered with $50 each (shipped).
I know that sounds backwards.
The best news, is each drive had under 400gb of data written to them. The power on hours was around 5000 IIRC.
These were Intel's first MLC drives, and they had 512gb of flash and quite a bit of overprovisioning. There was a utility to increase the overprovisioning even more for increased endurance. They are not super quick by modern standards, but I am using them for boot drives and they are far quicker than rust drives.
I know that sounds backwards.
The best news, is each drive had under 400gb of data written to them. The power on hours was around 5000 IIRC.
These were Intel's first MLC drives, and they had 512gb of flash and quite a bit of overprovisioning. There was a utility to increase the overprovisioning even more for increased endurance. They are not super quick by modern standards, but I am using them for boot drives and they are far quicker than rust drives.
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I'd think that 4x2 might be a bit on the slow side (read). You'll also need a cache drive which will determine write speed. Also a HBA to put the drives on.
Unused space - not with vsan - scaleio can do that.
For vSAN I have managed to use for capacity per disk group 5 x 960gb Samsung PM1633 and cache 1 x Samsung SM1625, that’s as you can tell an all SAS hot swap, works well but there is 10 nodes each with 2 disk groups.
Have also some small 2-6 nodes small setups with 900gb SAS hard disk and 400/800gb SAS SSD as cache that with regular light workloads work ok.
vSAN so far is not patching real SAN for performance but in larger setup scales ok and has other advantages... like not being dependent on SAN infrastructure.
Anyway what I wanted to say is you won’t be amazed by small all flash vSAN performance but it’s ‘ok’
Have also some small 2-6 nodes small setups with 900gb SAS hard disk and 400/800gb SAS SSD as cache that with regular light workloads work ok.
vSAN so far is not patching real SAN for performance but in larger setup scales ok and has other advantages... like not being dependent on SAN infrastructure.
Anyway what I wanted to say is you won’t be amazed by small all flash vSAN performance but it’s ‘ok’
agree. WTF. That's just a reseller grab, not exactly what servethehome forums are all about.
Looks like seller has 600gb drives for $175 buy now Intel DC S3500 Series SSDSC2BB600G4 600GB SSD HD331 735858262293 | eBay
Buyer beware - the description says 600GB, but the seller web page says 480GB. Might be worth triple-checking, just in case.
Just an FYI - I use S3500 300GB drives as the caching tier for my VSAN 2-node ROBO setup. They perform fine while the servers are up and running, but if I need to reboot either server then this drive will most likely come up showing a size of 0 bytes and the caching tier for that server will be missing. I've found this to be a heat issue and shutting the server down and leaving it off for 10-20 minutes and then booting it back up fixes the problem and the drive space is reported correctly. This is running off LSI 9211 cards (Dell branded - flashed to IT mode) in HP G6 servers so YMMV.
The fate of mine at 1:00 am seems sealed too. Better the $ goes to a seller that is capable of a response.
