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

  • ScrubblesOPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    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

    • qupada
      4•1 year ago

      To expand on @doeknius_gloek’s comment, those categories usually directly correlate to a range of DWPD (endurance) figures. I’m most familiar with buying servers from Dell, but other brands are pretty similar.

      Usually, the split is something like this:

      • Read-intensive (RI): 0.8 - 1.2 DWPD (commonly used for file servers and the likes, where data is relatively static)
      • Mixed-use (MU): 3 - 5 DWPD (normal for databases or cache servers, where data is changing relatively frequently)
      • Write-intensive (WI): ≥10 DPWD (for massive databases, heavily-used write cache devices like ZFS ZIL/SLOG devices, that sort of thing)

      (Consumer SSDs frequently have endurances only in the 0.1 - 0.3 DWPD range for comparison, and I’ve seen as low as 0.05)

      You’ll also find these tiers roughly line up with the SSDs that expose different capacities while having the same amount of flash inside; where a consumer drive would be 512GB, an enterprise RI would be 480GB, and a MU/WI only 400GB. Similarly 1TB/960GB/800GB, 2TB/1.92TB/1.6TB, etc.

      If you only get a TBW figure, just divide by the capacity and the length of the warranty. For instance a 1.92TB 1DWPD with 5y warranty might list 3.5PBW.

      • ScrubblesOPEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        Got it. So I’m thinking my ZFS is what killed these poor drives, who didn’t sign up for that sort of life. I think short term I’ll run over to best buy and get a decent 1 or 2 TB drive to migrate things to just to keep it running (and not use ZFS). From what I’m reading on other forums - yeah ZFS was the killer here.

        Long term, maybe enterprise drives, or really deciding if my app server even needs a pool. I did that last time as a “I don’t want to run out of storage for a while” but I’m seeing 4TB drives now for a few hundred bucks. Not cheap, but much cheaper than the 2k they were just a few years ago. I don’t store anything on the app servers, just containers and vms.