Hey folks, I’m at my wits end. I’ve been screwing with proxmox for years now, but I’m at a tipping point. I’ve just used consumer SSDs in it to run my VMs off of - but I just realized after a dozen or so crashes over the last week that I think the SSDs are the culprit. (Really, really terrible write speeds leading to kernel crashes I believe).
I’ve never gotten an enterprise SSD, if that’s even what I need. Any recommendations? New? Used? Brands?
Appreciate it
How do you know you’re getting higher quality? When you’re looking at them they all seem the same
I recently upgraded three of my proxmox hosts with SSDs to make use of ceph. While researching I faced the same question - everyone said you need an enterprise SSD, or ceph would eat it alive. The feature that apparently matters the most in my case is Power Loss Protection (PLP). It’s not even primarily needed to protect from an possible outage, but it forces sync writes instead of relying on a cache for performance.
There are some SSDs marketed for usage in data centers, these are generally enterprisey. Often they are classified for “Mixed Use” (read and write) or “Read Intensive”. Other interesting metrics are the Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) and obviously TBW and IOPS.
At the end I went with used Samsung PM883.
But before you fall into this rabbit hole, you might check if you really need an enterprise SSD. If all you’re doing is running a few vms in a homelab, I would expect consumer SSDs to work just fine.
Well I have the exact same use case and I just checked and yup, 3 out of 4 drives failed in a year. Those were shitty WD blues though, so I think it’s time to shell out real money
Read the data sheets.
You’re mostly going to be concerned with IOPS and endurance for VM hosting.
Endurance rating in TBW or PBW is the main indicator I look for. That and a DRAM cache.
Samsung SM863 enterprise SSDs can be found cheap on ebay, and they’re rated for quite a lot.