Which NVME is best for servers?

[humptydumpty]

Which NVME would you go with for a Cloudron server hosting random apps (including Nextcloud with a lot of writes)?

The NAS drive has an insane lifetime of 2000 TBW compared to 600 TBW on the other two drives. The Pro NVME has faster read/write speeds and better durability (not sure how "fast" it'll be on a PCIE 3.0 board). The regular drive offers the most bang for the buck.

NAS NVME: Western Digital SN700

Pro NVME: Samsung 980 Pro

Regular NVME: Samsung 970 Evo Plus

[MooCloud_Matt]

@humptydumpty
The evo if I remember correctly use 3 layer or 4 layer nand, so not really ideal.
The WD Red is not the best for performance but it's firmware is probably more optimize for storage in a NAS or server.

[humptydumpty]

I got a great deal on these and had to grab 'em. Elitedesk 800 G3 DW (35W), i5-6500T, 8GB RAM. 250GB SSD (2.5") + original HP power supplies for $500 total. Oh, and they come with a Windows 10 Pro license!

They need some love though. I'm replacing the CMOS batteries, the thermal paste with Arctic's MX-4, adding heatsinks to all the chips (raspberry pi heatsinks work great) and tossing in some wireless cards while I'm at it. The Cloudron server will have 32GB RAM (that's the max the board allows) + a 1TB NVME drive. Also, I'm thinking of making a custom top cover to accommodate a 80mm fan for better airflow since it'll be on 24/7.

Is this the sexiest thing you've ever seen or what!?

[humptydumpty]

@MooCloud_Matt I assume what you're saying about 3 or 4 layer nand is this " V-NAND 3-bit MLC". If so, should I look for other drives that have less or more layers?

I know that in real-world use for gaming and most software applications, we never fully take advantage of the NVME speeds. Only those doing encoding use up all that speed or so I've read. Is this also true for web servers?

[MooCloud_Matt]

@humptydumpty said in Which NVME is best for servers?:

less

Less is better for writing a lot of random data, without burning the Nand lifetime.
All the time that you have to write, delete or modify a bite of data, on one column, all the layer need to be rewritten, which mean that that need to be moved.
So more layer more work, and less performance on spikes of small random write.

We have a lot of Dell Optiblex, they are great I hope that you will have a good experience with the elitedesk, but now I'm so sad because there is no support for M1 CPU on linux, so no real ARM server for small/medium providers.

[MooCloud_Matt]

@humptydumpty said in Which NVME is best for servers?:

custom top cover to accommodate a 80mm fan for better airflow since it'll be on 24/7

See how it goes, the i5-6500T is not soo power-hungry, so you should be fine even for a 24/7 server.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty How about using them for a Proxmox cluster? High-availability Cloudron, plus whatever other OSes you wanna play with.

[MooCloud_Matt]

@marcusquinn
They have win10pro so hyper-v it's easy to use and pre installed, could be faster and easier the use proxmox

[robi]

My experience in the storage arena would stick with the Samsung higher end Pro drives.

They're the only company that is fully vertically integrated (makes all their own chips) and doesn't cheat by swapping component parts after an initial announcement to save on costs.

Many of the new announcements for speed this or bandwidth that are mostly for show, which you can't replicate in later model numbers.

Hence don't focus so much on the underlying process or layers in this category.

[humptydumpty]

@MooCloud_Matt Thanks for the explanation! The 980 Pro is 3 layers and the 970 Pro is 2 layers but there's a HUGE price difference. 970 Pro is $116 more for the 1TB version on Amazon US. Ouch! Edit: just noticed that's a 3rd party seller.

@robi It seems people are having issues with the SN700 and saying that WD isn't honoring the warranty so Samsung Pro seems like the way to go. Besides, all my OS drives are Samsung and I haven't had a single one fail on me and those aren't even the Pro series so that says a lot about their quality.

@marcusquinn I've never self-hosted before. My first and last attempt was on an old laptop which I tried to get Cloudron set up but ended up taking it down because of IPv6 issues but that shouldn't be a problem now that Cloudron fully supports it. I love the idea of having a high-availability server. I remember reading a discussion about it on this forum. Sadly, only one is available (so far) for me to use as a server.

[LoudLemur]

Backblaze regularly publish interesting statistics on drive survival:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2021-drive-stats-review/

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2021/