Considering ssd's for heavy mixed workload

As the title implies. I am working as a freelance designer and programmer. I have an SM951 nvme running my OS. very happy with that. Z97 MB.
My workload consists of some photoshop and autocad work from the OS - disk, in addition to 4 VM's (vmware workstation) running Windows 7/8 versions that run off of 2 x 250 GB Raid 0, 850 EVO's with IRST.
Please no comments on raid vs no raid concerning risk. I know what I'm doing, and I've never had a mishap. I do not care about the risk and I will not discuss it.

The VM's run multiple installations of Autodesk Maya, Visual Paradigm, Visual studio 2013 Ultimate, Dreamweaver, XAMP + PHPmyadmin & databases. On top of that I have a lot of word documents and pdf's open + some music and some video ed in adobe premier pro.
This load is more or less permanent when the computer is on. I have 32GB of RAM and a Intel 4790k processsor.
Under heavy workload I notice excellent performance from the SM951 and mostly good performance from the raid 0. But..... I get these pretty regular dips in performance. I have now tried moving 2 of the vm's over to a second set of raid 0 850 evo's. But these dips in performance are still noticable. Latency in the VM's goes up, applications and interface start moving slower, but then they are back to normal after a short while.
Before suggestions about hardware or software implementations - My processor is never stressed above 60-70%, my graphics card is a Nvidia gtx 980, and I have set up both ram and other resources including ssd optimalization hundreds of times before. I monitor resources regularly so it is not an issue as far as I can see.

My question is : Could a different set of ssds help in the case of e.g better potential steady state performance/ heavy mixed workload for read and writes ?
I ask because I have read up quite a bit on this, and I think I am reaching the kind of workload where this notion of the "consumer" ssd doesn't quite do it for me anymore. The reviewers keep insisting that you will never as a private consumer manage to reach the higher queue depths of iops. Ok, so I don't run a data center. But I do see from newer ssd reviews that consumer ssd's are performing quite badly under low queue depth for e.g 4k - 8k read/write loads. So would it help to actually switch to a pair of enterprise ssds like the new Samsung sm863 ? They are actually not that expensive, and if they are consistent under heavy sustained workloads , then why not use them ?

Anybody have any constructive comments or actual experience with using some kind of enterprise grade ssds in a client computer ? Are there any downsides with todays newest drives like the sm863 in that kind of scenario ? I mean, if you can have a couple of 240 GB drives of this type for almost the same price as a couple of Sandisk Extreme Pro's or Samsung 850 Pro's - IS there any reason not to go for it ?

By the way, my setup is not the one in my signature, as I run almost the same components for a desktop setup.

 

@tilleroftheearth is the man you should listen to.

 

I'm listening.....

 

@PushT you didn't mention how much do you overprovision your SSDs.

 

Tried 10% , 15% & 20%. Couldn't tell any diffrence from raw disk. I can understand if the 850 evo's are not the most consistent drives for mixed workloads. I'm just trying to get a feel for what my real options are( or could be).

 

@PushT , do you know that the bottleneck is for sure the disks? Have you been monitoring Active time for the disks to see if they're being maxed out in the scenarios where you get 'slowdowns', maybe the disks aren't the bottleneck?

 

For the type of workload you describe, and if battery life is not an issue (which it doesn't sound like it is), I would go with the Intel SSD 730 Series. They're basically enterprise-grade drives but without the enterprise-grade cost.

 

Heresy! Anything less than 30% is God-awful and blasphemous! =p

 

I HAVE been looking at that drive. Thank you for the suggestion ! Do you have any experience with it ?

 

Hehe.... I'm sorry, I'll have a go at 30 % .... I swear...
But seriously thanks for the suggestions here. I appreciate it!

 

Thank you ! I'm going to go back and watch performance a bit, and I'll have to get back to you on that ! I haven't seen anything unusual in performance monitor but I will do a more thorough run as soon as I'm at my computer.

 

I had some spikes in disk activity, but they were short and seemed natural in accordance with startup of vm's, applications etc. I overprovisioned the ssd raids with 30%, but didn't see any immediate difference. Have made adjustments to windows theme and font size in guests, made sure all ssd optimization tricks were done in both host and guests. When running the system today it feels good. I noticed some smoother desktop response after setting the desktop items in guests back to default size, but that doesn't account for "hangs", freezes or slowdowns ? So it would seem overprovisioning properly did it for me, at least for now ? I don't see any differences in performance monitor, but I didn't think I would be able to... Thank you for input, people I would still like to hear if any of you have run enterprise drives in a desktop setup !

Sent from my HTC One M8s using Tapatalk

 

Weird that performance monitor doesn't show high usage of the SSD's, maybe it's not the issue then. Maybe occasionally one of the CPU cores is being maxed out when you're getting slow downs, can't think of anything else. I don't know much about enterprise drives, so I'll let someone else comment about that.