SSDs for new NAS: new consumer drives or used eBay SAS SSDs?

So I had this great plan to build a NAS with 5x 10TB SAS HDDs (~28TB usable RAIDZ2). All the drives would cost me $480, which is a nice $0.0096 per GB. However, that doesn’t factor in the power cost (oof). These HDDs are in total 29W (0.58W/TB). So, what is the current best deal to get a lot of reliable SSD storage?

A quick look and the 870 QVO 8TB is $615 today. That’s $0.077 per GB. The same amount of storage as my HDDs would be $3844. If I use 5x 4TB QVO (~11TB usable RAIDZ2) I’m still looking at $1575.

Would you consider non-enterprise SSDs reliable enough to replace enterprise SAS HDDs that are barely being stressed (mainly home backup and media use)? Replacing a $100 HDD at most every other year would need to be cost-equivalent to replacing one of these consumer 4TB SSDs every 3 or 4 years. I’m thinking that this maintenance expenditure is the best way to figure out the tradeoff of what I can afford (once I can figure out how reliable these really are).

I have also found 4TB SAS SSDs on eBay for ~$260 to $290 (MZ-ILS3T80 and similar) but these seem like they would be really hit or miss (possibly really old?). I found one deal as low as $200. Should I just go for it? I don’t understand the used SSD market very well.

What would you do?

This is what I did:

I would never consider QVO drives and nobody here will recommend them due to the poor reliability and dismal performance. Seems also that you’re not gonna stress these drives too much so I think that TLC consumer drives will do the trick for you aswell.

Keep in mind that if you want to use SAS drives you’re gonna need to use a SAS controller that uses way more power than a SATA one. So you might be just moving the power consumption issue from the drives to the controller.

If you go for new consumer drives I think you should try and buy them for 200$. Over that I think it’s overspending. I had to wait till black friday to buy at that price, yikes.

1 Like

Yes barring outliers like no-name trash tier ssds and anything QLC based like 870 QVO.

Search for QLC performance horror stories, we are not pulling it out of our asses. These drives should not exist.

If you build array out of them, you will regret it deeply in the end.

Very helpful, thank you! I think I need to wait to get the same or similar deal as you: $1200/24TB

OK, no QLC! Looks like the 870 EVO is probably the best bet for SATA.

It seems that even though I found enterprise SAS 4TB SSDs for $200, the 870 EVO seems pretty popular for NAS builds. On the other hand, for every recommendation of them I am also finding posts like these (repeated failures): https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/15uss0a/my_experience_with_samsung_evo_870_ssd_in_raid1/

I guess it depends on my read/write ratio. I will use this for media storage, photo backup, and some lightweight VMs like Home Assistant. It would be very nice to not have to worry about how I am going to use it though.

I didn’t think about this. There is one card that will at least get to C6: The Curse of ASPM - Part II: Broadcom 9600-24i, but it’s $230 and draws 18W idle still assuming I can get it to work properly vs. your $80 ECS06. It is possible that the 9500-8I can do it (and idle at 6W + ASPM!): https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/16crhfc/comment/l6w0fbd/. If so, then at $100 that’s a good deal I think.

If I am going to have to wait until Black Friday for a SATA SSD deal, then I might as well also wait and see if the 9500-8LI is a good method to use SAS SSDs (someone on Reddit is testing this out).

I think it’s really luck of the draw and Samsung, being the big manufacturer it is, tends to be kept on the spot for every little issue. Their product are not cheap and people demand for them to be really really good. They also had pretty big snafus with firmwares in the past (I remember the 840 Evos and the 980 Pros). I don’t wanna jinx myself but no Samsung SSD has failed me yet in over 10 years.

I don’t think that’s the issue. They might’ve made a batch that’s more prone to failures, maybe the controller cannot sustain the way BTRFS works (wouldn’t know how that would be possible, but I’m chucking this possibility in there too).

That was one of the things I took the L for, to be honest. I had no choice because it was either that or some chinesium card with unknown capability to upgrade the firmware. I encourage you to try and get out of that cheaper than I did with a generic ASM1166 card and update it’s firmware through the Silverstone program. If you manage to get one for 40$ or less you’re gonna pay the proper amount for what you bought.

Sure, unless you’re dying to backup your stuff and you know you might lose it soon, take your time to do all the proper research, figure out the best components for your application, try to keep into account all the little details too. I sure took my sweet time to make something like that but it was worth to me.

Since I was already planning to get a $80-$100 HBA when I was looking at HDDs, I’ve already factored this into my budget/I’m not worried about that part.

HAH ha haaaaa… Don’t look to closely at my other posts here. I uh… have definitely not been thinking about this for years. /s

Anyway, yeah no particular rush. I’m currently fortunate to backup to my friend’s NAS offsite that we will eventually sync snapshots across (offsite backup) once I have a NAS of my own.

1 Like