i have a MS-A2 and want to pack in some storage. My workload is pretty diverse, but not too IO intensive usually. But there are some occasions, where the box simply saturates network IO with downloads for 5 days straight and needs to store that data.
The biggest i can get for consumer and datacanter hw:
3x WD_BLACK SN850X 8 TB for around 600€ with 5PB TBW
So 24TB Storage with 15 TB TBW for 1800€.
or
2x Datacenter SSD PM9A3 3.84TB for around 550€ with 5.5 5PB TW
1x Datacenter SSD PM9A3 7.68TB for around 850€ with 11PB TBW
So 16 TB Storage with 22 PB TBW for 2000€
I kinda think more storage is the better option over TBW, as a) no ssd has died for me ever and b) storage gets bigger and cheaper.
Why would i buy datacenter HW if it is supposed to be “the good stuff”?
It’s special stuff for special people with special needs.
Features. No write throttling, PLP, namespaces, encryption, etc., And U.2 form factor which has higher power limits and thus higher performance aside from way higher capacities than M.2 allows (long-term upgrade path).
PBW is pretty much a concern of the past…unless you really really know you are writing 30TB each day and every until 2031, it doesn’t matter. I consider everything >5PBW as de facto indestructible for practical purposes.
PLP? If your workload involves sync writes, consumer drives are a piece of trash. 3k vs. 100-300k IOPS.
You do sync writes, you get PLP.
I run Ceph and all Ceph does is sync EVERY SINGLE BLOCK…so there is no choice really. Go Enterprise flash or go home.
If it’s storage capacity you’re after, prosumer nvme drives offer a good price/performance ratio.
Enterprise drives offer 24/7 performance for workloads that require it. The difference to consumer drives is night and day.
You don’t need those unless you know why.
Enterprise drives require active cooling. Also, most enterprise drives are of the 2.5" 15mm height U.2/3 form factor.
Both reasons probably don’t make it a great fit for the MS-A2. There are ways to work around it, but it ends up a compromise you need to be willing to make.
Have have some folks here with MS-01 using the 110mm long M.2 slots for Enterprise M.2 (which the PM9A3 is usually known for).
I agree you can’t fit or cool U.2 in there…certainly not two of them or 15mm SKUs.
That’s a sentence I like very much. But with MiniPC clusters spreading (cause cheap and low power per node + Thunderbolt/SFP+), stuff like Proxmox+Ceph isn’t too much of a stretch.
Spending 1k on drives and end up with “sth is wrong with the writes” isn’t great, but spending +600 for stuff you never use or need isn’t great either.
Your average NTFS/ext4/BTRFS/ZFS home/media server just needs good old cheap consumer drives. And you can get more drives for the same money, so even performance and storage efficiency is better per €.