Hi All,
So I’m busy gathering bits and pieces for what is (to me) an ultimate workstation build .
The system is going to be built around amd threadripper 5000.
My research so far indicates that pretty much the Seagate 530 nvme is the quickest nvme out? With the 2tb and 4tb variants being the top picks
Originally was going for 4 x 1tb firecude 530 in raid 0 but spotted the 2tb is quicker in the write Dept … so , so far it’s 4 x 2tb firecuda 530 in raid 0 for my workstation OS’s which will be Linux and windows .
I’ll be using the highpoint ssd7505 raid card .
I intend on installing a few mechanical Satas aswell for bulk storage …
I will do a full raid0 clone a couple times a week to a image file on the sata volume which will likely be 4 x 18tb drives in raid6 so pretty much bulletproof .
I’m digressing a bit , my question is this , current as of August 2022 is the firecuda 530 still the king of the hill ?
I haven’t played too much with nvme raid, I have worked.plenty with Linux mdadm with raid volumes using mechanical Satas …
I just read Intel optane is no more …
But a quick search on Intel P5800X reveals its stupid expensive . 4 x p5800x or such in raid0 would be impressive if I had just won the lottery though I probably wouldn’t stop at 4.
Thoughts ? Is there perhaps something more enterprise grade (drive wise) that I should look at ?
The firecuda 530 is very gamer orientated however has excellent endurance stats…
Form what I can gather you really don’t want to use the raid built into the motherboard for Linux but that’s the only option for windows unless you use a vm
I don’t recall if windows ever resolved the whole trim being unsupported on raid arrays
hi, couldnt agree more… i had a few cards stringed together using a gigabyte 4 port nvme to pcie connector and the benchmarks werent all that stellar (used bifurcation 4x4x4x4)
however, the highpoint ssd7505 appears to be a great solution.
has a web interface and whatnot, think behind the scenes its probably a linux mdadm solution…
card has oprom so can boot with systems that for example dont support nvme bootup.
Pretty much. Kingston KC3000 and Kingston Fury Renegade have similar numbers. The Kingstons write a bit faster but read slower than the Seagate. They all have 1500+ TBW. And the KC3000 is almost $80 cheaper than the Seagate. Those number are on paper, haven’t seen actual tests.
Check out Micron 7450 Pro/Max, 6800 reads and >5000 sustained writes depending on size. Pro for read optimized version with less write IOPS and more capacity. U.3 drives have higher power limits and performance over M.2
What is the state of nvme cache? If say a sn850 dumbs down after 200gb of sustained writes, does that not mean it has maybe 200gb of cache? If the only partition on that drive is just 200gb will the drive still reallocate the written data out of the cache? Any drives out there that let you change this behaivior? I just need two nvme drives that can keep a sustained 7GBps. For at least 120GB everytime.
I ended up ordering 4 x 2tb Seagate firecuda 530s…these will be run in raid0 on a highpoint ssd7505… I’ll be doing a weekly image of the drive to a raid6 mechanical volume to mitigate risk .
Unfortunately it’ll be a while before I get to test the above ,these are some of the components of a upcoming build …
Last components I still need is the threadripper pro 5975 CPU and most likely ASRock wrx80 board . The latter components still.need some “fundraising” to procure …
I digress but rest of build is basically ;
Lian li 011xl case,corsair ax1600i psu,Nvidia a4000 gfx card with waterblock ,full watercooling loop with 3 x 360 rads and huge reservoir w/ seperate d5 pump.
Everything is already purchased, now just.the board and CPU cannot wait
Waterblock for CPU will.be heatkiller IV pro or optimuspc threadripper block I have bought both so will be experimenting …
One thing I’ll add about the 2.5” drives using the U.2/U.3 connectors, is to keep an eye on temps under the maximum loads you have. These sorts of drives are generally expecting forced airflow, but at the same time individuals like us are unlikely to stress them anywhere near as long and hard as what they are rated for. So a fan, may or may not be needed.
Always make sure you have proper airflow and no components are running hot.
I’ve got 4800X optane drives and about 2 dozen NVMe that I’ve been testing. The fastest NVMe drive I’ve found is the SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB with 7400/6800 read/write and 1,400,000/1,300,000 4K IOPs and 1,200 TBW. This is the only NVMe I’ve tested that holds speed during extended writes.
The KC3000 is very close but doesn’t handle extended writes as well. Both the P41 and KC3000 use flash iat 1,600 MTps than the 1,200 MTps speeds other NVM3e run at.
The KC3000 is available in up to 4TB versions with 3,200 TBW and 7,000/7,000 read/write speeds with 1,000,000/1,000,000 IOPS.
On paper the KC3000 appears faster but the P41 gains an advantage due to the high amount of DRAM memory used which also lowers latency allowing it to hit such high IOPs.
Software RAID isn’t fastest enough to really let a bunch of NVMe’s shine. For that you need something like a SupremeRAID SR-1010.
You can see how much difference it makes in the chart above.
The Memblaze PBlaze6 6920 NVMe SSD are available up to 15.36TB in a U.2 footprint. For performance, the maximum quoted numbers are 7.1GB/s and 1.6 million IOPS.
Of course PCIe 5.0 will change this and allow nearly double these numbers.
On a side note: ZFS is pretty bad handling NVMe from a performance standpoint. It’s getting harder and harder to justify ZFS without an ability to have tiered storage using NVMe (l2ARC and special devices aren’t tiered storage) as well as “fabric”
I’m pretty sure the highpoint ssd7505 is just software raid, which will slow down anything but sequential reads and writes considerably compared to a hardware raid solution.
GRAID is interesting, supposedly they updated their software last month so that consistency checks can now be performed which theoretically makes them a viable raid solution; before this update their product made no sense. <<only applicable to parity raid schemes, ie not raid0.
I think that for raid0 graid and software raid are going to perform the same because the data first goes over the pcie bus to cpu; the graid card was only speeding up parity calculations, and there are none in raid 0.
If you wanted max performance with nvme drives, particularly under random read/write conditions, hardware raid is the way to go.
