Hey all, working on some research for a friend, basically doing computer janitor stuff as I am sure many of us here do. My friend is a software dev working for a company dealing with some blockchain stuff, he is specifically doing some benchmarking or something. Anyways he asked for my help with choosing an SSD solution for storing extremely large amounts of data. He wants to be an SSD for the much higher rand-IO performance but was looking at 4TB or more. From our conversation, it seems really speed at random small file IO and large capacity are the two primary criteria. Raw Siquencial throughput is not a huge concern so SATA is totally an option over PCIe if it saves some money or gets us a better SSD or both. My question is, are there even any SSDs out there above 4TB from say Kioxia or Intel or someone else in the enterprise space? What’s the best option for a large capacity SSD in general(4TB or more)?
Edit: For clarity, as it seems my wording misled some people, the drive or drives will be added to his current Ryzen Based desktop, not a server. I only mention looking at enterprise drives as I assumed there would be larger capacity drives available in the enterprise space.
Update: Turns out I am a dummy and missed the fact our local computer store caries Samsung 8tb sata SSDs, so that is what my friend ended up with. Until now I was not aware Samsung or any other non enterprise lineup had SSDs that large.
What’s his budget per disk, how many does he need? And if he goes NVMe, does he have the expensive and sometimes finicky hardware to connect the amounts of disks he wants?
Sata has advantages like lower power usage and way easier and cheaper ways to connect, but won’t be able to hit close to the latency or throughput of a proper U.2 NVMe drive. Note that these should have some kind of cooling if they have a heavy load.
But if he truly wants low latency, NVMe kicks the pants off of SATA.
His best bet is to go to American EBay, and search “SSD” and filter by storage capacity. There are many enterprise drives from the previous generations that are almost as good as new, and go for around $100 per TB. Given enough time and smart search and setting up alerts, you can find screaming deals.
Here’s a 7.68TB micron 5210 for under $100 per TB, multiple available immediately.
On the SATA side 7.68TB on the enterprise side is the largest I’ve seen supported on Dell servers without a RAID card. SSDs for SATA have more or less peaked at the max speeds, if the servers are 8-16 drive bays there is more value for per dollar going the SATA route even at the trade off of speed–also not all servers have equal PCIe slot speeds and that limits actual NVMe options.
Largest SSD I’ve seen/read about is Seagate Nytro topping out at 15.3TB for the SAS version, if the servers are enterprise with a RAID card there is a possibility it supports SAS drives but you’d have to check.
Thanks for the input. He told me the budget is whatever we deem reasonable, as the company is willing to buy almost anything he needs to get his work done, but we don’t wanna be stupid or take advantage or anything like that. We would probably be looking at a single drive or maybe 2-4 at most in a simple software raid or on a data raid card. It’s going to be going in a Ryzen desktop, not a server. Sorry if I gave the impression that it is going in a server of some sort when I mentioned we were looking at enterprise drives, I just assumed to go above 4TB per disk would require buying something enterprise, not consumer.
Thanks for the input as well. Sounding like there may be an enterprise option out there for larger capacity, but harder to find. Sorry if I gave the impression that it is going in a server of some sort when I mentioned we were looking at enterprise drives, I just assumed to go above 4TB per disk would require buying something enterprise, not consumer. This will be an additional drive or several dives added to his Ryzen based desktop.