Enterprise SSD as Main OS Drive?

[Ikasu]

About to nab a D7 P5600 for my heavy write simulation drive, but got me to thinking. Is it worth picking up an enterprise SSD for a main drive as well?

I was planning to nab a 990 Pro 2tb for my main operating system/boot drive runnings windows 10. But at the price I'd be paying, would just be a tiny bit more for a 3.84TB D7 P5600 compared to the 990 Pro 2tb. Looking online I can't find any benchmarks comparing enterprise and consumer SSD's in real world usage. Found a few on older StorageReviews articles that showed houdini sim time, which was helpful, but not much else for traditional use. Would be a all purpose drive, daily machine, 3D/Creative workstation, with some gaming for sanities sake.

I understand the trade offs, sustained performance benefits vs burst, lower write speeds, higher power, etc...But haven't reall found much benchmark wise to get a real idea. Anyone with first hand experience on the matter?

 

[Dopamin3]

What motherboard will you be using them with? The 990 Pro is M.2 NVME whereas the Solidigm is U.2 NVME.

Just looking at the raw speed numbers, the write speed is about halved on the D7 P5600/5500 (which btw, I don't even see a 3.84TB model, I think you're referring to the D7 55xx series) and the read spead is slightly slower. The 990 Pro will be "snappier" across all workloads. Unless you're doing HEAVY writing to the boot drive I would avoid an enterprise drive. The 990 Pro 2TB has a 5 year, 1200TBW warranty and is just plain old fast. The only benefit to the Solidigm is write endurance if you're really pushing it crazy hard.

 

[uOpt]

U.2/U.3 is currently king, especially if you also have a hotswap frame. The drives go relatively cheap since few people want them and since you can't easily have many of them in a desktop system.

As for interface, it is trivial to adapt NVMe m.2 to NVME U.2. They are electrically the same, all you need is a passive adapter with a power connector:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VB6L8SJ/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=AE0SVKWTGDVJF&psc=1

Mount the drives in 2.5" slots that have a fan and you are golden.

 

[Ikasu]

What motherboard will you be using them with? The 990 Pro is M.2 NVME whereas the Solidigm is U.2 NVME.

Just looking at the raw speed numbers, the write speed is about halved on the D7 P5600/5500 (which btw, I don't even see a 3.84TB model, I think you're referring to the D7 55xx series) and the read spead is slightly slower. The 990 Pro will be "snappier" across all workloads. Unless you're doing HEAVY writing to the boot drive I would avoid an enterprise drive. The 990 Pro 2TB has a 5 year, 1200TBW warranty and is just plain old fast. The only benefit to the Solidigm is write endurance if you're really pushing it crazy hard.

Apologies, I meant 3.2tb.

That's precisely what I've been concerned with, knowing the burst of the 990 pro would be higher. ATM leaning to a 990 pro 2tb boot, and a 6.4tb D7 P5600 as my work drive. Houdini sims are gonna utterly destroy a consumer drive, hence the enterprise approach. Going to nab a 990 pr for boot, and the D7 P5600 for my sim drive. Newer drive compared to the Ebay drive I had my eye on, pcie gen 4, can support 3DWPD, so roughly 33PBW at the size I'm looking at. Houdini sims, especially liquid sims, can utterly destroy a consumer drive very quickly. A single frame can eat 400MB of data. So mutltipled by 30 (frames in a second), by 20 (20 second flip simulation), that would be roughly 240GB of data for a 20 second sim. Considering the workflow requires running sims back, to back, to back, as you iterate, can quickly wear out a drive. Those numbers are also a lighter workload. If it's a very heavy flip sim, can spiral out of control size wise.

U.2/U.3 is currently king, especially if you also have a hotswap frame. The drives go relatively cheap since few people want them and since you can't easily have many of them in a desktop system.

As for interface, it is trivial to adapt NVMe m.2 to NVME U.2. They are electrically the same, all you need is a passive adapter with a power connector:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VB6L8SJ/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=AE0SVKWTGDVJF&psc=1

Mount the drives in 2.5" slots that have a fan and you are golden.

I was pleasantly suprised at how cheap some of these enterprise SSD's can go. I was going to order an older DC p4610 6.4 or 7.68TB drive. But saw ServerPartDeals pop up intel drives with warranty at the same price range as ebay, so a no brainer.

Thanks for the link. I'm actually picking up something similar, got two of them coming from Aliexpress that use detachable SFF-8643 cables. Wanted to guarantee PCI-E 4.0 support, so ordered these two.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251...t_main.11.588c18024thavk&gatewayAdapt=glo2usa

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256...st_main.5.588c18024thavk&gatewayAdapt=glo2usa

It's just aggravating to know I can get higher quality, higher endurance enterprise drives, with higher capacity at roughly the same price as a consumer drive...Makes me question why I'm buying a 990 pro. You would think the consistent performance and designed nature of being hit with large amounts of requests would make them snappier as an OS drive, hence why I reached out to see if that was the case or if I was mistaken.

 

[philb2]

Apologies, I meant 3.2tb.

That's precisely what I've been concerned with, knowing the burst of the 990 pro would be higher. ATM leaning to a 990 pro 2tb boot, and a 6.4tb D7 P5600 as my work drive. Houdini sims are gonna utterly destroy a consumer drive, hence the enterprise approach. Going to nab a 990 pr for boot, and the D7 P5600 for my sim drive. Newer drive compared to the Ebay drive I had my eye on, pcie gen 4, can support 3DWPD, so roughly 33PBW at the size I'm looking at. Houdini sims, especially liquid sims, can utterly destroy a consumer drive very quickly. A single frame can eat 400MB of data. So mutltipled by 30 (frames in a second), by 20 (20 second flip simulation), that would be roughly 240GB of data for a 20 second sim. Considering the workflow requires running sims back, to back, to back, as you iterate, can quickly wear out a drive. Those numbers are also a lighter workload. If it's a very heavy flip sim, can spiral out of control size wise.



I was pleasantly suprised at how cheap some of these enterprise SSD's can go. I was going to order an older DC p4610 6.4 or 7.68TB drive. But saw ServerPartDeals pop up intel drives with warranty at the same price range as ebay, so a no brainer.

Thanks for the tip about ServerPartDeals. So I was wondering why this drive costs so much less new than used. https://serverpartdeals.com/product...-tlc-3dwpd-sed-u-2-nvme-2-5-solid-state-drive. Since it has "certified firmware" will it work in my "consumer PC," AMD X670E chipset with ASUS BIOS?

It's just aggravating to know I can get higher quality, higher endurance enterprise drives, with higher capacity at roughly the same price as a consumer drive...Makes me question why I'm buying a 990 pro. You would think the consistent performance and designed nature of being hit with large amounts of requests would make them snappier as an OS drive, hence why I reached out to see if that was the case or if I was mistaken.

Yeah, I am also wondering.

 

[bluestang]

servethehome.com has some good info and reviews on Enterprise drives just as the storagereviews site you mentioned.

 

[Ikasu]

Thanks for the tip about ServerPartDeals. So I was wondering why this drive costs so much less new than used. https://serverpartdeals.com/product...-tlc-3dwpd-sed-u-2-nvme-2-5-solid-state-drive. Since it has "certified firmware" will it work in my "consumer PC," AMD X670E chipset with ASUS BIOS?

Yeah, I am also wondering.

I posted on Homelab subreddit, regarding if the drives custom firmware would be compatible. Also Dell EMC drives usually have 520/528 byte block sizes which would make them incompatible. But apparently the Dell branded Intel drives use 512 block sizes, and are compatible.

Here's a response directly from ServerPartDeals regarding the drives.

"The Dell/Intel NVMe drives (edit: on our site, not all Dell NVMe) are standard format drives. Will work in any system that supports U.2 NVMe - essentially any system when using the PCIe adapter - and standard formats like 512e/4kn.

Dell has systems that require 520byte sectors, but these drives are not for those systems."

So full compatibility it seems. Plus the fact it's sold from an authorized seller coupled 5 year warranty is a win win. Checking up SolidIgm terms(New owner of Intel drives/fab), state warranty replacement you'll need the receipt, so safe bet buying from ServerPartDeals compared to ebay. Ebay is just used drives being resold, majority with very low usage and high health, or new excess which is great, but don't offer any warranty protection since you aren't the original buyer.

In regards to cost, the U.2 form factor makes it not drop in compatible with standards desktops, and would require additional hardware/adapters to do so, hence the lower interest compared to consumer drives. Not really that much more expensive though. Either the PCI-E slot adapter, or a M.2 to U.2 adapter as the ones posted previously, ezpz.

 

[daglesj]

I got a U.2 Optane P4800X a few weeks ago and used the Startech PCIe adaptor. All worked perfectly. I would get more...

 

[Ikasu]

I got a U.2 Optane P4800X a few weeks ago and used the Startech PCIe adaptor. All worked perfectly. I would get more...

Damn. I would love an optane drive. But unfortunately I need some rather large capacity SSD storage, would cost an arm and a leg if it was optane....=P.

 

[GotNoRice]

I've had good results with Enterprise SSDs lately. Longevity of consumer SSDs has really gone down as the industry embraced TLC and is now moving to QLC. Small SLC and DRAM caches only take you so far when you usage is more than just 99% reads, and even these features are only found on "good" drives in many cases.

For example, in my main PC I have a dedicated SSD where I keep all of my VMs, which include 6 different channels of Windows 11 builds (21H2, current aka 22H2, Release Preview, Beta, Dev and Canary), as well as Windows 10 64-bit, Windows 10 32-bit, Server 2022 and Server 2019. Just maintaining all of those VMs on the latest version, I was seeing the health of my SSD drop about 1% each week as reported via CrystalDiskInfo. I also have a SSD in my main file server which gets used for things that I want to distribute to other computers across the network quickly. So a lot of things get copied to that drive. It was also seeing an alarmingly quick reduction in drive life. I recently replaced both with used Samsung Enterprise drives and have not seen the drive life budge at all despite hammering both drives with writes even more than before.

Though I'm still sticking with my 980 Pro for my games drive. I don't think that there is any need to have everything on just one SSD.

 

[philb2]

For example, in my main PC I have a dedicated SSD where I keep all of my VMs, which include 6 different channels of Windows 11 builds (21H2, current aka 22H2, Release Preview, Beta, Dev and Canary), as well as Windows 10 64-bit, Windows 10 32-bit, Server 2022 and Server 2019. Just maintaining all of those VMs on the latest version, I was seeing the health of my SSD drop about 1% each week as reported via CrystalDiskInfo.

Wowzers!!

Though I'm still sticking with my 980 Pro for my games drive. I don't think that there is any need to have everything on just one SSD.

No different really than if you used multiple HDDs, except for better performance. Five years from now, I expect that HDDs will become a miniscule fraction of drives sold to consumers, except for guys with an NAS.

 

[Ikasu]

Wowzers!!

No different really than if you used multiple HDDs, except for better performance. Five years from now, I expect that HDDs will become a miniscule fraction of drives sold to consumers, except for guys with an NAS.

Agreed. With spinning disks market share shrinking smaller and smaller as time goes on. I mean heck, we currently have 30 TB enterprise SSD's in a 2.5 inch for factor, albeit at outrageous prices. Really looking forward to when we can drop spinning disks entirely, but endurance is always a concern considering consumer market variants are terrible in this regard. It was really sad to see optane exit the market. Would of been fantastic if it gained traction and market adoption from other manufacturers compared to NAND...Better performance, insanely higher endurance compared to current drives, even compared to the enterprise market.

 

[philb2]

. It was really sad to see optane exit the market. Would of been fantastic if it gained traction and market adoption from other manufacturers compared to NAND...Better performance, insanely higher endurance compared to current drives, even compared to the enterprise market.

Intel should spin off this product or license it out.

 

[uOpt]

Not all enterprisey SSDs are good, though. I got a 10-pack of Micron M600s (MLC) and although they were not too noodled out the performance was abysmal.

This might be more on Micron, though.

 

[Down8]

Intel should spin off this product or license it out.

It would've been nice if they rolled it into Solidigm somehow.

-bZj