Best bang for buck prosumer/enterprise SSDs for NAS & Home Media Server

Hardware Hub Storage
,
1

Hey folks, I recently found some time to finish speccing out my first NAS build, and fell down the rabbit hole of SDDs vs. HDDS, and wrote SSDs off as being too expensive after looking at Kioxia CD6 prices. However, after seeing some threads on the Truenas forum discussing prosumer SSDs, Wendell’s forbidden router series, and Backblaze data, I began considering speccing out a prosumer or used enterprise SSD build and comparing it to a traditional HDD build.

That leads me to my question:

Are there any good cheaper but reliable SSDs that folks have experience using or would suggest using in a NAS? How would prosumer drives compare with used enterprise drives?

The main use case for the Nas will be serving as a media storage and backup device, but I’m also building it to dip my toes into homelabbing. Since I don’t see the drives getting overwritten a lot with what I plan to use the device for, I wouldn’t be surprised if even cheap consumer SSDs could last for a long while. I saw that the Samsung 860 Pro was recommended on the Truenas thread, but if folks see any issues with using those or have other/better options, please chime in!

Some more details on use cases and constraints:

Planning on running Truenas Scale in Raidz2

Use cases:

  • NAS file backup
  • Private Cloud server (i.e. Wireguard for remote access to NAS)
  • Music server (Samba, maybe Plex Amp or something similar)
  • Home assistant
  • Pi hole
  • Optional: Minecraft server, Plex/Jellyfin Media Server, VPN/Proxy

Constraints:

  • Power: Main constraint, want this as low as feasible (no power hungry servers basically)
  • Noise: minimal but not critical (the rack is in a corner of the basement, so it can make some noise, but preferably not so much that it is annoyingly loud from the other side of the basement. Some sound dampening could be added, but a quieter base is best)
  • Budget: $1000-$4000 (not budget constrained, want to build something that works well and reliably for the next 5-10 years, but not wildly or unnecessarily expensive)
  • Reliability: It’s a home NAS so data security isn’t critical, but ideally as reliable as possible as only critical data will be backed up to the cloud in full 3-2-1 fashion. Some of the non-critical data will at least be stored on multiple devices at the very least.

As you can see from these constraints, SSDs fit nicely with the power and noise constraints, and maybe, in this use case, reliability (emphasis on maybe, depends on how many writes the SSDs undergo, but as I mentioned above, I anticipate a mostly write once read many use case).

Also note that I didn’t include capacity. For now I don’t anticipate needing more than 10-20 terabytes, but if I do end up going full data hoarder mode, I’ll cross that bridge when it comes. Mostly looking to put together a comparison SSD spec to my current HDD spec, and see how things shake out.

I won’t go too into detail into other platform decisions I’m considering as that likely goes beyond the scope of this question, but I can definitely add more details on this front if needed/curious (you can also check out my thread on the LTT forum, but the build has evolved a bit since).

2

Get Toshiba Enterprise MG08/MG09 for storage (Mirror) and WD SN750 Black/Crucial P3 Plus/P5 (NVME, Mirror) for I/O intensive stuff if needed. Done

If you want SATA SSDs (not really cost effective these days) I’d look at WD Blue 3D or Sandisk Ultra 3D (same hardware) which in my experience works well including with ZFS.

1 Like
3

I personally suggest HDD’s for data storage above SSD’s. HDD’s are cheaper, more likely to warn you before anything really fails, and even if something does fail, you can pretty much always recover your data off the platters.

By contrast, SSD failure can be sudden, and is often total data loss when it happens, and they cost a lot more.

Western Digital Ultrastar HDD’s that use HelioSeal tech are my favorites. They are data center drives, and tend to last a very long time.

I run the 16TB Ultrastar drives these days. They go on sale occasionally and sometimes you can get great prices for them. March 31st is ‘world backup day’ and Western Digital had pretty deep discounts on that day for the drives.

I personally don’t mind data storage being slow, reliability is more important to me.

And for what you are doing, you shouldn’t need blazing fast speeds. That’s my suggestion anyways.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the input folks!

Great, I’ll check these options out. I was focused on SATA SSDs for better cost per gigabyte, but I’ll check out the NVMe SSDs and see how far off they all. I don’t need blazing speeds for my application, more just about better speeds, lower noise and power draw overall vs. HDDs.

Yep, completely understand and mostly agree with where you are coming from. My current spec is using Seagate Exos drives since they pop up a lot on the Truenas forum, but I’ll price and feature compare some of the options you guys brought up here.

What I am trying to do here is come up with an SSD comparison to see what that would look like based on my constraints listed above. If there are SSDs that people have used for a standard backup pool and had success with, I’d love to hear about it. While sudden SSD failure is a concern, I have no problems purchasing more drives for a raidz2 array, and even a raidz3 array if folks would suggest it, along with other tweaks to ensure that the data is still secure even in the event of a total drive failure.

This is certainly not a made decision at this point, and I expect to ultimately go with HDDs, but wanted to make sure I’ve fully explored all the options before pulling the trigger.

2 Likes
5

This isn’t a problem if you have backups, which you should. HDD draw more power, take more space , make more noise, and make more heat. As far as I’m concerned the only downside of SSD is the cost.

@QuantumNoisemaker It really depends on the perf you’re looking for. For a pure NAS setup with 1Gbps links, you can go DRAM-less SATA like the Samsung QVO – the drives will easily keep up with a 1Gbps or even 2.5Gbps link and will handle random I/O wayyyy better than HDD.

1 Like
6

That’s like saying, ‘if your house burns down, it’s not a problem if you have another house’. Well this being the real world - most people can’t afford to have multiple houses. (heck most people can’t even afford a house these days!) The same is true for computers. Even having a dedicated server of any sort is very rare for the average person. Let alone trying to set up off-site backups and multiple machines for data redundancy.

And a simple RAID setup is not a backup. It’s like having a fire extinguisher that might work half the time. I’d rather have HDD’s for that extra layer of safety. And from personal experience over the last 40 years, I have never personally lost data from a dying HDD. I’ve always been able to recover it. And the same is true for almost every case where i’ve been dealing with dying HDD’s from working professionally in the tech world over many years. Can the same be said of SSD’s? Not at all. In fact in the very short time SSD’s have been around, i’ve seen people lose data completely many times from failures.

In my opinion SSD’s still have a long way to go before I will trust them with anything important. I don’t care how fast they get. Reliability and recovery is more important.

If SSD’s get cheap enough that I can buy twice the space on an SSD vs an HDD, then maybe i’ll switch over to SSD’s for important storage, because I can then afford to start doubling them up for data redundancy. I.e. if a 20TB HDD costs $400, then $400 worth of SSD’s needs to be 40TB - because I expect SSD’s to fail catastrophically.

Of course I still use SSD’s and NVME’s, they do improve performance. But I would never put anything I care about on an SSD.

2 Likes
7

I haven’t seen any enterprise reports indicating that SSDs are inherently less reliable than spinning rust, and the good old BackBlaze analysis from this year indicates that they’re seeing both a lower AFR overall and now a reduction in the number of failures going forward than their HDD counterparts. Point of this thread isn’t to fanboat one particular storage technology so I’ll drop it there.

Honestly if I were in your situation I’d just stack up an array of consumer SSDs with an extra one for redundancy instead of overpaying for enterprise drives. I don’t trust storage from resellers but that’s just me, and I doubt you’ll be doing enough writes to really justify the extra endurance you’d be paying for. Enterprise SSDs also tend to draw a lot of power and run a lot hotter than consumer parts.

Not going into much detail about Samsung because the 870 EVO is pretty much the default choice for SATA SSDs at this point. Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives are being reviewed pretty highly and have higher endurance but are a little expensive for what they are. There are good things being said about SK Hynix’s new SSDs too, but I’ve never had one in person and they’re only up to 2TB/drive. They seem nice. I wouldn’t hesitate to go with any of those three options.

8

We’re discussing a person who’s considering an all-flash NAS and has mentioned their budget is not constrained. They really should have a backup setup.

3 Likes
9

It’s not so much about the number of failures, it’s about the way the failure occurs. I thought I made that fairly clear when I was talking about it earlier… When an HDD fails you can usually recover the data because it typically is not an entirely unrecoverable failure, and most of the time you can get the data off the platters.

But when an SSD fails, it usually is catastophic, and the data is entirely inaccessible.

I personally would need more than 5000 dollars to make an SSD backup system with enough space and redundancy that I would trust, especially when I could get such a huge amount more space, much more cheaply, and have it be more reliable with HDD’s. *(Reliability in terms of actually losing data, not just any random event that counts as a drive failure - as established by the types of failures that actually cause data loss I talked about earlier.)

As an example, I have 60TB of storage that I trust on HDD’s. for me to trust that with SSD’s would require 120TB of storage, because I require double the redundancy if I am going to trust my data to an SSD array.

So lets use 4TB SSD’s because they are fairly ‘affordable’ compared to the other options on the market right now. That means I would need 30, 4TB SSD’s, each costing about 300 dollars per drive at the cheap, That’s well over 9000 dollars just for the drives alone, not even counting the associated hardware needed to support them. So it’s a hard ‘nope’ - even for his ‘unconstrained’ budget.

BUT lets bring this back to his more modest requirement of 20TB. That means 40TB in ssd’s to be what i would consider ‘trustworthy’ because of redundancy requirements. That means 10, 4TB SSD’s, 10x300 dollars is 3,000 dollars for the drives, then all associated equipment needed for an array to support that number of drives, hmm… ok he ‘might’ make it under the 5k max.

But why should he even go that high at all when he can do the same thing for so much less using HDD’s ?? Fewer total drives needed, much cheaper, more reliable, much more space per drive - and less total drives reduces the hardware requirements to support them all. Seems like HDD’s are the way to go to me.

2 Likes
10

So lets do the same thing with HDD’s, he would need 2, 20TB drives, But lets go with 22TB drives and we can easily double them up, they are currently selling for 599 each, so lets round up to 600 dollars - That’s 1,200 dollars for 2 drives to get 22TB of storage with redundancy (actually 44TB of space just halved so he can double up the data)!

Suddenly you don’t need a fancy array, you can run it off basic hardware because you aren’t running 10 drives. This lowers overall equipment costs, and you get more storage space, and i bet it takes up a hell of a lot less ‘real’ space too.

i’d also bet that electricity costs are going to be roughly comparable, and likely heat as well. with better reliability. And that’s being generous to the hardware needed to support those 10 SSD’s compared to the 2 HDD’s. And probably the HDD’s would even make less noise because he can run it off a simple computer, no need for fancy server equipment.

So if you don’t need super speed, SSD servers are still an entirely silly way to go because they cost too damn much. HDD’s handily win the storage wars.

(So - That whole video Linus made saying that HDD’s were dead - Yep. He’s plain wrong. Until the price of SSD’s gets close to where HDD’s are for the same amount of space - HDD’s are still going to be useful and will have an important purpose. They are not anywhere close to dead, and won’t be for a very long time. Linus’ video was clickbait, in the bad way, because he was wrong. And that video confused a lot of people with it’s bad information.)

2 Likes
11

This might help in picking if you’re going with prosumer drives, sadly I don’t have enterprise SSDs here, but overall, you’d probably be fine with any of the better drives with DRAM cache and TLC from Samsung, Micron, Hynix or Nanya

4 Likes
12

Backblazes data only shows failure rate, which tbh is pretty similar for both, but the big difference is that complete failure for an HDD is comparably rare compared to an SSD, if your NAND chip fails, getting information off of it is lucky at best

1 Like
13

My argument here is that any failure of an HDD is a complete failure for home use, as most people - especially someone using it at home in a NAS - aren’t going to spend several hundred dollars on data recovery. And with a dual parity ZFS pool they shouldn’t have to.

OP asked about upgrading to an array of SSDs. I would agree with Stratego that really any of the better consumer drives with a DRAM cache from Samsung/Hynix would be good, or something like Seagate’s IronWolf or similar prosumer NAS drive with a slightly higher rated endurance.

1 Like
14

I mean for most HDD failures you don’t actually need to spend anything to get data back, it just is painful to get the data off of those drives because it’s time consuming. SSD failures are warrantied to require someone with specialized equipment to take a look at it.

As for consumer tier SSD’s thanks for agreeing with me :smiley:

1 Like
15

i´d probably would put a bunge of ssd´s in the NAS.
But also like two larger HDD´s as additional backup drives in case,
one of the ssd´s fails you will still have a mirrored back up on both HDD´s
The reason is because HDD´s are still fairly cheap for large storage capacity.
So having two drives for secure back ups on the ssd´s for a few pennies more,
would be a no brainier in my opinion.

For a good nas ssd there are of course various options.
Samsung pro drives are generally pretty reliable.
But like with everything it will also be a matter of luck over time of course.

5 Likes
16

This sounds like a decent solution. It cuts down on the number of SSD’s needed because you would be making a backup of that data onto an HDD, so the SSD’s would only be there as temporary storage until the data could be properly mirrored to an HDD.

Of course, I don’t personally think an SSD would even really be needed, i use HDD’s for storage and data retrieval all the time, and they are plenty fast enough for basic uses like watching movies or even playing games.

Here’s a little blurb directly from western digital talking about their drives. There’s a good reason I suggested HelioSeal drives. And things like TCO matter even for an individual private server environment.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Drives the Data Center Architecture

Data center decisions are driven by TCO. Higher capacity hard drives play a leading role in reducing TCO. An 18TB data center internal hard drive provides 29% more capacity in the same form factor as a 14TB HDD. Higher capacity HDDs enable data centers to lower CapEx by reducing supporting hardware and system level costs when compared to lower capacity drives. Helium-sealed, low power, high reliability drives reduce energy and maintenance costs, contributing to OpEx savings. For example, a data center using 18TB HDDs vs. 14TB HDDs can require 22% fewer racks while consuming 21% less power per TB at idle, resulting in significant overall TCO reduction for data center environments.

I personally have used HelioSeal drives for several generations of data storage over many years now, and can say that they are great technology, and I would say they far outweigh the benefits of SSD’s for data storage. I first got into HelioSeal drives when I heard NASA and Observatories around the world were using them for their scientific equipment because of their increased reliability, lower noise, and low vibration characteristics.

2 Likes
17

Ignoring the WD marketing above me, what sort of system will be hosting this? Do you have the PCIe slots and bifurcation support to support a handful of either M.2 or U.2 drives via PCIe breakout cards?

NVMe SSD value has improved drastically in recent history, might be worth considering an array of them if you have the hardware to support it, but that’s gonna be a pretty beefy system to have that many PCIe lanes.

If you’re hosting Minecraft and/or game servers, I’d look into at least getting one NVMe drive specifically for hosting them, it made a huge difference on my own NAS that was also running ARK + Minecraft + Project Zomboid servers simultaneously for our little group of a dozen or so people.

1 Like
18

WD sells SSD’s too. But I do not suggest them. - my post is all about HDD’s over SSD’s. SSD’s are not worth it imo. Their cost is too high, and they do not offer significant improvement in the type of data storage in question here.

1 Like
19

I’m about to start flagging your thesis on WD hard disks for being off-topic when the thread was specifically asking for SSD recommendations to help decide on a configuration.

SSDs absolutely offer a significant performance improvement in a NAS, and NVMe over SATA is a noticeable upgrade if OP is going to be using this system to host game servers which stream world assets to the client or distribute large files as part of configuration/mod distribution to the users, etc. Which is a lot of them.

That’s why I just asked if they have the resources to support such a setup.

4 Likes
20

Flag away, this is a technology discussion and I stand behind my statements and I see no reason why a discussion about various technologies available could possibly be off topic at all. The man came in here asking for advice about storage options, and we are giving it. So far I see nothing off-topic about anything anyone has posted, aside from your baseless threat just now.

The one thing I do see is people who are passionate about technology, and that is not a bad thing at all.

You do raise good points about streaming data, if he is planning on offering server benefits to many people, and this is going beyond any sort of very small group use, then integrating a few SSD’s would be useful, as MisteryAngel also mentioned in their earlier post.

For greater clarity, it should be mentioned that my own perspective is from that of a single user. And waiting a second for a drive to spin up from sleep mode every once in a while does not bother me at all. I have never personally noticed any significant delays introduced during regular use of HDD’s. The one slight exception is with more modern games, SSD’s do help reduce load times greatly on larger titles, or doing something significantly intensive like restarting a computer entirely, but the original posters mention of minecraft did not fit that requirement - and this being a server, it will very rarely be starting from shut-down.

Also my very early experiences were with loading data off tape drives on a commodore 64. Compared to that, everything we have these days is beyond 7th level sorcery. So waiting a second every once in great a while for data to be pulled from an HDD does not bother me in the slightest.

2 Likes