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Samsung SSD drives in servers
jnelson3149
Member
in General
I was all set to use some Samsung 4tb SSD drives in a proxmox server when somebody told me that they will beat themselves to death in less than a year. Thoughts? Experiences? I have in the past used spinning drives (mostly Hitachi) and not had failures. I would appreciate hearing your experiences.
Comments
I think Hetzner is using Samsung, your friend should tell them about this too
Personal/homelab use, non-hosting business use, or hosting business use?
Fine for personal usage, and likely fine for small business use, but 24/7 busy servers will fill the drives and the speeds will be low. Enterprise drives are more critical for more sustained writing use.
Make sure to update firmware to latest before using. Shouldn't be an issue anymore.
It really depends on the drive (Are we Talking Evo (QLC/SLC/...), Pro, or DC Series?) and how you are using them (ie: mdam raid.... or zfs or.....) as well as how you are using it for vm-disks.... Along other factors such as how many writes you are expecting to be doing. Depending on your usecase however....it may be just fine (ie: a homelab).
A while back i did some experimentation/testing with "Consumer Grade" drives when some clients expressed their interest in lower end ssd disk options. For me its not worth it.
Hi,
it depends on the model and your workload.
If you use consumer grade models, things might go down the hill quiet fast.
I suggest you: Check out how much TBW this drive actually delivers according to the vendor. If its multiple PB, then at least the duration is somewhere enterprise class or at least NAS class.
If not, its consumer for desktop use.
If you want to know if a device is enterprise class, then check for the technical features. Especially features that ensures data-safety even on powerloss will be enterprise class features.
We've had zero issues on 990 PRO drives with thousands deployed. Performance, longevity, etc..
It all starts with the type and quality of the NAND chips in the SSDs.
SLC = 1 bit per cell
MLC = 2 bits per cell
TLC/3D = 3 bits per cell
QLC = 4 bits per cell
Put simply, every SSD's NAND package (the "little black parts" of the drive) contains many cells. Those cells can be divided to store more data within the same physical space, at the cost of speed and longevity.
For example, let's take an SSD whose raw SLC capacity is 256GB. Manufacturers can use frequency and voltage trickery to expand that 256GB into 512GB (MLC), or to 1TB (TLC), or even 4TB (QLC). Every time the cell is split, its endurance drops by about 4x, and the latency & throughput by around the same, too.
Thus, SLC is king, but very expensive, and so it's only ever used for the entirety of the drive in the highest-cost, fastest-performing enterprise drives. Most consumer-grade SSDs use TLC, which offers a good blend of performance and longevity.
However, it's possible to "re-assign" certain cells on the NAND package to be SLC or MLC, while leaving the remainder as TLC or QLC. Most manufacturers do this in practice by taking ~10%-30% of the overall capacity and using it as a write buffer. In this configuration, newly written data is saved to SLC/TLC first, then moved to the cheaper TLC/QLC bulk in the background. This works well on consumer machines where the user isn't reading or writing data all the time, but in server scenarios, performance will decrease drastically once the SLC/MLC write buffer is filled.
In comparison, while many enterprise SSDs also use a mixture of NAND cell technologies to maximize their capacity, the proportions of buffer-to-bulk are much larger and you may well see something like 20% SLC, 40% MLC and 40% TLC. In addition, enterprise SSDs also sport large DRAM caches, which are even faster memory-based caches for writes, so they can support the headline-advertised speeds for much longer before slowing. Plus, enterprise SSDs have power loss protection (PLP) so that even more enhancements can be made to performance without the risk of data loss in the event of a power outage.
So, while consumer-grade SSDs might not meet the high demands of an AI or heavy database workload, they can work in a server environment, just not at the same great speeds as you'd enjoy on your typical desktop. Additionally, consumer-grade SSDs are not all the same grade, with more expensive models sporting higher performance and sometimes are even "cross-overs" from the enterprise series of a particular manufacturer. For example, many Samsung Pro drives are indeed datacenter or cheaper enterprise drives but rebranded.