Best 2.5inch SAS drives (600+GB)

H

Henri108

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 6, 2013
Messages
465
I have to upgrade a server (Dell Poweredge R620) to higher capacity drives.
It currently only has 4 300GB 15.000 RPM drives in it. I'm looking at going with 8 600GB drives. Any experience with good 2.5inch SAS drives? Good pricing is a plus of course.
 
Are you looking to just shuck the existing drives out of their carriers and upgrading them? What is your workload? Are they in an array? Any reason why you are not considering SSD upgrades instead of 15k 600GB?
 
mwroobel said:
Are you looking to just shuck the existing drives out of their carriers and upgrading them? What is your workload? Are they in an array? Any reason why you are not considering SSD upgrades instead of 15k 600GB?
Click to expand...

600gig 15k rpm units are $700 a pop

On the other hand 10k rpm (90% of the market) is only $200 a pop, and just get some 5 year warranty Seagate Savvio's.



If he is going 15k rpm, yea just get some ssds.
https://www.sandisk.com/business/datacenter/products/flash-devices/ssds/sas-ssd/lightning
 
mwroobel said:
Are you looking to just shuck the existing drives out of their carriers and upgrading them? What is your workload? Are they in an array? Any reason why you are not considering SSD upgrades instead of 15k 600GB?
Click to expand...
We'll put the old drives in another server that doesn't need a lot of storage.
Workload is running sales applications (used remotely all around the world), a website, bookkeeping application and that's it.
It's not in array.
Thanks, will look into SSD's.
nightanole said:
600gig 15k rpm units are $700 a pop

On the other hand 10k rpm (90% of the market) is only $200 a pop, and just get some 5 year warranty Seagate Savvio's.



If he is going 15k rpm, yea just get some ssds.
https://www.sandisk.com/business/datacenter/products/flash-devices/ssds/sas-ssd/lightning
Click to expand...
Will check out the Seagate's and the Sandisks.
 
davewolfs said:
Why use magnetic over SSD?
Click to expand...

I just checked out the SAS SSD's, these things are expensive...
Cheapest I found were older ones that still cost 1.5$/GB.
If I only needed 500GB of usable space this would be a no brainer, but I need a few TB!
 
I see it also has 3 PCIe lanes free. Is it possible to configure an intel 750 PCIe SSD to run everything? With a few HDD's as a backup? Can you Raid PCIe SSDs?
1.2TB usable space would be enough (just checked).
 
I would not use an Intel 750 in a server / multi-user business environment....
Look at the P3600 at minimum, but for multiple users writing data the P3700 is the winner.

You need UEFI and OS to support the NVME drives.

If you can't run NVME they make 1-2TB Fusion-IO which also would be better than the SAS drives, and are made for what you want to do too (multi-use, high endurance, high quality, etc)

Oh, and 600gb 15k RPM SAS and "cheap" don't go together :D
 
Last edited:
Henri108 said:
I just checked out the SAS SSD's, these things are expensive...
Cheapest I found were older ones that still cost 1.5$/GB.
If I only needed 500GB of usable space this would be a no brainer, but I need a few TB!
Click to expand...

Why not use sata drives? Pretty much any sata SSD will beat the crap out of a SAS hard drive.
 
Darakian said:
Why not use sata drives? Pretty much any sata SSD will beat the crap out of a SAS hard drive.
Click to expand...

Thats what I was thinking as well, 2TB of SAS will cost like 2K while 2TB SSD will cost less. But they are all MLC, The enterprise SLC SSD's do cost a lot more though so it might end up the same but would be preferable as they would be 4x faster. Remote access would not need SLC no matter what. You just can not upload enough data unless you are now talking about a remote office with dedicated fiber type setup. Many of consumer grade SSD's now average 50GB of data a day.. And in fact would most likely make sence here.. Throw them out in 2 or 3 years and replace them with faster ones. The cost would endup being the same over 5+ years. Like what backblaze does..
 
Aren't SATA SSD's a lot less reliable in a server eviroment? It will be in a data center and hopefully shouldn't be touched in the next 5 years. Needing to service it alone would easily cost 500$.
 
Henri108 said:
Aren't SATA SSD's a lot less reliable in a server eviroment? It will be in a data center and hopefully shouldn't be touched in the next 5 years. Needing to service it alone would easily cost 500$.
Click to expand...

We have a 16 disk sas array (raid 0 mirrored) and pop a disk at least once a year(and we are using old ass 160gig units that "should" be more fault tolerant). It is a 24/7 sql server and hosts a shared network drive that writes text logs for tests electronics and hosts pdfs of all of our procedures.

I take it this server you are upgrading is hosted off site and is meant to never see a human, ever.
 
nightanole said:
We have a 16 disk sas array (raid 0 mirrored) and pop a disk at least once a year(and we are using old ass 160gig units that "should" be more fault tolerant). It is a 24/7 sql server and hosts a shared network drive that writes text logs for tests electronics and hosts pdfs of all of our procedures.

I take it this server you are upgrading is hosted off site and is meant to never see a human, ever.
Click to expand...

Correct.
I was thinking about this:

We would need 1TB free space. If I buy 6 512GB Samsung 850 PRO's, I can use 2 unused and if there are failures, we can "add" these.
 
Henri108 said:
Aren't SATA SSD's a lot less reliable in a server eviroment? It will be in a data center and hopefully shouldn't be touched in the next 5 years. Needing to service it alone would easily cost 500$.
Click to expand...
I thought it had to do with 2 things...
1. Certain types of server usage can still wear out an SSD's ridiculously high write count. Magnetic HDD's can simply write until the mechanical parts like the motor, bearing, or head finally die or if there is a head crash due to high vibration.

2. The kinds of SSD's you would want in a server are still pretty expensive.

Both of these factors are changing quickly and won't be an issue for much longer.
 
Intel Pro 2500's are advertised as Enterprise grade, but still pretty cheap.

I understand that consumer devices will fail faster in a server enviroment, but how much faster?
SAS SSD's are 4-10 times more expensive. So if I buy 2 times the amount of SATA SSD's compared to SAS SSD's, I'll have redundancy taken care if or not?
 
There's a reason SAS drives be it SSD or Mechanical cost so much more... they're made for business use, they're made for 24/7 'on' and able to run 100% if need be 24/7 too. They are more expensive because quality control is better, their error rate is lower, they're faster, and much more.

In SSD market you have "read" purpose SSD and then others that are good at writing and reading, but writing is key as it's what will cause your SSD life span to decrease. This is why home SSD commonly only have 30-80TB endurance of "writes" as a manufacturer rating, and this is on 200-600gb+ SSD... for comparison Intels model SSD 2 years ago for a 100gb for business would last 500TB!

Without NOT knowing your work load we can't really suggest SSD. Give us an idea of how many GB or TB of data is written per-day, or your array stats, then we can look into SSD options that will last.

"Needing to service it alone would easily cost 500$. " statement alone to means they should be of the top quality, most endurance, etc... side of things vs. bargain side. Which means I'd want some redundancy and performance, and if I only need 1TB of space something like 4x 800GB Intel S3700 SATA SSD. They're high endurance (petabytes of writes!!), fast, and RAID10 them. Depending on budget and how important up time is I would consider hot-spare
 
We're going with the 600GB SAS drives. It made most sense in terms of durability. It's our last server before going to Azure.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top