Anyone put 850 EVOs in a RAID5 on a Dell PERC controller?

Putting together a new Dell T630 server and looking at 1.2TB 10K SAS drives, but then I starting thinking at the price point, I could go with 1TB 850 EVOs. Want to have at least 4TB of storage, so it would get 5x 1TB EVO 850s in a RAID5 on a PERC H720 with 1GB of cache. Anyone done anything like that? Or should I suck it up for the 850 PROs?

I don't need a lot of performance, I am ultimately after reliability. If I can do it with SSDs and get that speed.....why not?

 

If you're not looking to kill the drives with constant writes (even for a few minutes/hours a day), I would consider the 2TB 850 EVO's instead. Better performance overall for light workloads than the Pro (and with better recovery performance after hitting them hard too) and it seems like Samsung drives (at least this one) is finally better than the much, much cheaper SanDisk Extreme Pro is in real world performance (finally...).

The 1TB EVO or Pro is not worth considering, imo. Even though you don't care for performance, they simply suck. SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB drives would be my choice instead.

Assuming performance really isn't an issue, you can probably save money by foregoing the RAID controller too. Even though enabling write caching gives s huge improvement.

See:
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2013/08/load-testing-solid-state-drives-raid/


As the article above concludes, you need to test for your specific workloads to see if RAID (and which version) is better or not than a single drive.

What is interesting is that the system will fail (hopefully not catastrophically) with anything other than Dell approved SSD's.

But worse, a single drive can be faster for certain workloads (heavy writes mostly) than 2x RAID0 or even 8x RAID10.

That is why I suggest the 2TB EVO... and if you can get away with 2 or 3 of them to get better performance and save $$$$, why not?

The capacity you need is an issue, otherwise multiple Intel 750 1.2GB PCIe SSD is what I would be considering instead (for performance and reliability over all other options).

If, the Dell T630 supports the Intel 750 drives natively.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

 

I tried a SanDisk Extreme and it seemed slower to me than an 850 Pro. 2TB is quite a jump in price, and I'd rather have more drives. I would bet that 3x 2TB vs 5x 1TB (same 4TB usable on RAID5)....the 5x1TB would be faster.

 

Slower in what workload? In snappiness, I agree it may be so. In sustained write heavy workloads (i.e. what a storage subsystem is usually pushed with) it isn't.

Look at the link, 8x RAID0 is not impressive vs. a single SSD. Yeah, the absolute number is higher, but the % increase (with 1GB RAM too on the RAID card) is not what I would call cost effective. Especially when the write performance vs. a single drive is less too.