For years I have wanted to store my most used data on an SSD. I need 8TB. I cannot bring myself to buy a crummy QVO Samsung SSD because they are terribly & impossibly slow IMO. I want large read AND writes to be fast.
I was turned onto Intel 4510 and Samsung PM9A3. Sanity check by those who likely know, are there “better” options for the money? (FYI, I know I will need a U.2 to PCIe converter)
Thanks in advance
I recently bought KIOXIA CD6-R Data Center SSDs with 7.68TB capacity. 1000k/85k IOPS, 6200/4000MB/s. I got them new and sealed for a third of the asking price, about 550USD including shipping from China.
I will check out the KIOXIA CD6-R. Do you know how they compare to the two I mentioned?
Sadly no, I have no basis for comparison. U.2/U.3 NVME SSDs should all be quite fast. Out of reason I went with the ones that were available and fairly priced.
I skimmed a review over at Storage Review. Its write performance seem to not be as good as the Samsung. However, for what I use it I am sure it would be amazing.
There are also 8TB M.2 SSDs available, like the Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro NH, Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro X, PNY XLR8 CS3140 and Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Then there would be no need for you to bother with U.2/U.3, unless you are also interested in the possible enterprise features that those U.3 SSDs offer, like namespaces.
There are also 8TB M.2 SSDs available, like the Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro NH, Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro X, PNY XLR8 CS3140 and Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Then there would be no need for you to bother with U.2/U.3, unless you are also interested in the possible enterprise features that those U.3 SSDs offer, like namespaces.
I am not familiar with those SSDs, I should look into them. My guess is that their $/TB is poor and some may slow in writing large amounts of data.
You should really look into U.2 and U.3 models. Enterprise drives have vastly better sustained write performance and consumer drives really lose their cost advantage >4TB capacity.
Check out Micron 7400 or 7450 series. Up to 32TB drives with state-of-the-art PCIe 4.0 performance characteristics. Pro line for read intensive stuff and Max for mixed/write-heavy stuff.
4x4TB consumer drives in a striping setup is probably the best bang for the buck and 4TB drives are rather affordable compared to 8TB (which is really only available for SATA)
Sadly, we consumers are stuck with SATA and low(er)-capacity M.2 drives.
This, pretty much. if you still want to go with consumer drives Just get two good and priceworthy 4TB drives instead of one big 8TB. In two years this advice will not make any sense whatsoever, but today, it is the best advice I can give ya.
I recommended a Crucial P3 Plus 4TB to a friend recently and he has reported no problems with it, At $265 it is practically a steal.
I think we are witnessing the last stronghold of mechs - bulk storage - is withering away now. Just like CD-ROMs, 3.5" floppies and 5.25" floppies, mechs are now going to fade into obsolescence. Two more doublings of SSD capacity, and it is over.
I broadly advise against used samsung enterprise drives. Plenty of life left in the flash, but I’ve personally had issues with their firmware being dogshit and seen enough of other people having issues that I’m forever turned off from them. Supposedly the PM9A3 drives at least have FW updates openly available, but this may or may not actually work depending on the age of drive, and they still like to enter an “ERRORMOD” state regardless, just like two of my older models did, so it’s not like that’s a real fix anyways. It’s sometimes possible to recover a drive into a usable state again, but this will result in complete data loss, so be warned. If it’s not recoverable, the only “support” you’ll get is from the “vendor” that sold it to you, not samsung.
I personally use a bunch of direct-to-CPU Intel D7-P5510 7.68TB drives, and haven’t had any issues for the ~8 months I’ve had them. They are more or less just a somewhat updated DC P4510.
That said, there is a case with the DC P4500/DC P4510 drives having performance issues when connected to a broadcom controller: Intel P4500/P4510 4 TB NVMe U.2 SSD - Abyssmal sequential results with Broadcom HBA 9400 and low read with AMD NVMe RAID0 - But Optane works fine?!, so if that’s your plan be warned.
Note that Intel sold it’s datacenter drive business to Solidgm/SK Hynix, so the tool to update those is now at: Solidigm™ Storage Tool
Note that connecting U.2 nvme drives can sometimes cause hair loss, as finding a method to connect them without errors is not guaranteed. Generally a PCIe adapter card seems to work best if you just have 1-2.
I’ve got a few of Samsung’s first-gen PCIe Gen4 PM1733 7.68 TB enterprise SSDs and while I haven’t had any hardware defect Samsung’s behavior of not publicly supplying firmware updates really pisses me off.
For new purchases I’ve switched to Micron 7450 SSDs that offer full end customer support and perform very well when you get models with at least 3.84 TB of capacity.
For what it’s worth, I’m happy with my 8 TB QVO drive. Yes, it’s slow with sustained writes, but I mainly use it for read-only things, and for that it’s plenty fast. I will probably buy another when I fill it up in a year or two.
My boot/root drive is NVMe.
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