I am shopping for a used Enterprise SSD on eBay for use in Proxmox Backup Server. Most listings don't mention SMART data or the health% of the drive. The ones that do range from 80% to 95%. I am running a small home lab, nothing major. I'm looking at some Samsung 960GB PM863a drives in the 80% range. What is an acceptable % health on an Enterprise drive?
What is an acceptable health percentage for used Enterprise drive for use in home lab?
- Thread starter servape
- Start date
Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
Depends on disk, price and foremost use-case.
That pm863a isn't very enterprisy with only 1.3PBW endurance (some better consumer grade ssd's get there).
If its much cheaper than brand new consumer grade 1T ssd then i personally wouldn't mind if i had use for 1T SSD.
That pm863a isn't very enterprisy with only 1.3PBW endurance (some better consumer grade ssd's get there).
If its much cheaper than brand new consumer grade 1T ssd then i personally wouldn't mind if i had use for 1T SSD.
PM863a is an enterprise model, rated for 1.3 DWPD for 3y, which is equivalent to 0.8 DWPD for 5y (the way DWPD are normally quoted). That's normal, non-write intensive, enterprise drive territory. Retail drives are more like 0.1 DWPD, QLC might be even less. The latest QLC enterprise drives are more like 0.6 DWPD, but granted they are also humongous
Most of the enterprise drives you will find on ebay will have health in the high 90s. Occasionally you find drives in the 85-95% range. Under 85% is usually disclosed (never happened to me to having less undisclosed, actually it did, but that was a 5 DWPD drive with 75% health, so plenty of life left). And they typically come from decommissioned data center servers, where they spent 5 to 7y in a stable, cool environment. Enterprises don't buy those drives because they plan to do 1 DWPD, 1 DWPD is just table stake for a drive in that market. The vast majority of those drives have hardly seen any significant write. And even for the write intensive ones (>3 DWPD), I think companies would typically overprovision the endurance to not deal with drive failures.
Retail drives on ebay is a much harder buy. Because of low endurance their health may be much lower, and god knows what the teenager you are buying from did with the drive. And lots of fake samsung SSDs that are just scams (will brick after a few dozen GB writes). Haven't seen any fake enterprise drive.
Then it depends what you plan to do with it. If you plan to use it as a cache disk or something really write intensive, then a 80% pretty much means 20% of endurance gone (health is usually more or less linear with bytes written). You still get to enjoy the bulk of its endurance.
But most homelab usage aren't write intensive. Maybe used in a NAS or as a boot drive, or to store VM. There 80% is pretty much as good as new. And again you are more likely to find a drive with >90% health on ebay.
Most of the enterprise drives you will find on ebay will have health in the high 90s. Occasionally you find drives in the 85-95% range. Under 85% is usually disclosed (never happened to me to having less undisclosed, actually it did, but that was a 5 DWPD drive with 75% health, so plenty of life left). And they typically come from decommissioned data center servers, where they spent 5 to 7y in a stable, cool environment. Enterprises don't buy those drives because they plan to do 1 DWPD, 1 DWPD is just table stake for a drive in that market. The vast majority of those drives have hardly seen any significant write. And even for the write intensive ones (>3 DWPD), I think companies would typically overprovision the endurance to not deal with drive failures.
Retail drives on ebay is a much harder buy. Because of low endurance their health may be much lower, and god knows what the teenager you are buying from did with the drive. And lots of fake samsung SSDs that are just scams (will brick after a few dozen GB writes). Haven't seen any fake enterprise drive.
Then it depends what you plan to do with it. If you plan to use it as a cache disk or something really write intensive, then a 80% pretty much means 20% of endurance gone (health is usually more or less linear with bytes written). You still get to enjoy the bulk of its endurance.
But most homelab usage aren't write intensive. Maybe used in a NAS or as a boot drive, or to store VM. There 80% is pretty much as good as new. And again you are more likely to find a drive with >90% health on ebay.
SATA? Budget? Is this for OS or to dump backups to? For OS literally anything 128 GB or larger that has firmware updates.
I got a few SM883 3.84 GB and those are enduring, but I say avoid Samsung because of their fscked up firmware and warranty policy.
If you can snatch up any MLC drive like some Micron 5100/5200/5300 MAX don't worry about endurance. Could buy the cheapest, or two and use them in RAID1. OEM 02JG545 also good, because for Lenovo or Dell OEM you can usually download firmware updates and be done.
I got a few SM883 3.84 GB and those are enduring, but I say avoid Samsung because of their fscked up firmware and warranty policy.
If you can snatch up any MLC drive like some Micron 5100/5200/5300 MAX don't worry about endurance. Could buy the cheapest, or two and use them in RAID1. OEM 02JG545 also good, because for Lenovo or Dell OEM you can usually download firmware updates and be done.
whatever brand you have trust in. Depending on how much/often you want to write consider endurance rating.
Personally I like sas ssd's, and intel's p4600's u.2's. I'd personally stay away from all oem, and samsung.
(I like Toshiba but keep in mind there is a model with bad firmware that lock up // micron is good alternative.)
(you can grab micron s650dc sas3 800G 10dwpd for around 75 usd on ebay)
from consumer grade disks:
crucial mx500 (tho lacks on endurance, its performance option)
Intel D3-S4510 (has endurnace but quite expensive for sata ssd - at this price i'd prefer sas any day)
Sandisk Ultra 3d NAND G25 (almost impossible to get now
WD RED SA500 2T+ only (decent endurance)
WD Blue 3d NAND 4T only (decent performance)
Personally I like sas ssd's, and intel's p4600's u.2's. I'd personally stay away from all oem, and samsung.
(I like Toshiba but keep in mind there is a model with bad firmware that lock up // micron is good alternative.)
(you can grab micron s650dc sas3 800G 10dwpd for around 75 usd on ebay)
from consumer grade disks:
crucial mx500 (tho lacks on endurance, its performance option)
Intel D3-S4510 (has endurnace but quite expensive for sata ssd - at this price i'd prefer sas any day)
Sandisk Ultra 3d NAND G25 (almost impossible to get now
WD RED SA500 2T+ only (decent endurance)
WD Blue 3d NAND 4T only (decent performance)
Last edited:
Look at your workload. I don't know how a Proxmox backup works, but if it grabs a bunch of data and writes out in large sequential blocks, then even a spinning drive might be fast enough. If you need more than about 4 TB, then SSDs get very expensive compared to spinning disk.
Then again, if the workload is all sequential write, drive endurance isn't a big a deal, as the quoted "1 DWPD" assumes random access. Most SSDs have much, much higher endurance if the load is all sequential, and large enough that entire NAND blocks are written at the once. In that case, an "read-intensive" enterprise drive would do nicely.
I've purchased 100s of enterprise drives on ebay and 95\100 are 98% or better health on the ones that don't mention it.
The ones that DO mention it are because people will return them sometimes from others who don't list them, and then they organize and sell them in ranges of % health.
The most used up drives I've gotten for crazy deals and have huge PB endurance so I just use them for mirrored OS drives on misc systems at home
100-400GB S3500\S3700 I've had come with PBs of writes, but still more than half left, and I don't write much on OS drives
The ones that DO mention it are because people will return them sometimes from others who don't list them, and then they organize and sell them in ranges of % health.
The most used up drives I've gotten for crazy deals and have huge PB endurance so I just use them for mirrored OS drives on misc systems at home
100-400GB S3500\S3700 I've had come with PBs of writes, but still more than half left, and I don't write much on OS drives
working in enterprise env - its often the case ssd's are ran in hw raid, and because of that trim cannot do its work - and was never actually ran once. They see performance hit, and they replace. (while disk still has 80-99% left)
(Thus they only wrote in small certain nand area. After trim, they work just fine.)
(Thus they only wrote in small certain nand area. After trim, they work just fine.)