Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?
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I'm putting Hyper-V on a decommissioned Dell R510 for a general LAB environment and testing, etc. I'm trying to scrounge up some spare drives (I have a lot) for a stable/reliable config. I have 8x 3.5" drive bays on this thing and my plan is to use slot 0 and 1 for two drives in RAID1 for the OS, then use the rest for a RAID10 array for storage (at a later time). Yes, I know usually you'd just do OBR10 but I'm not doing it that way.
Right now, I'm trying to decide which would be better: a set of 300GB 15K SAS Dell Enterprise drives or a set of consumer-grade 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drives.
I assume both will work fine but I've never really used consumer SSD's on a Dell server before.. input?
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Dell will often reject consumer drives. Or any non-Dell drives.
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The 15K drives have a lot more capacity here. For most lab purposes, that will be far more useful.
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I'd go with the 15K drives and OBR10 it. No point in introducing ssd's into this mix at all for even a lab.
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
The 15K drives have a lot more capacity here. For most lab purposes, that will be far more useful.
Well I want Hyper-V on these drives I'm talking about, then later I plan to have a huge RAID10 volume in the remaining 6 slots - like 4TB or something.
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
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If you wanted to use SSD's I'd hit up xbyte and see if they have any decent deals going that might work well.
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@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
If you wanted to use SSD's I'd hit up xbyte and see if they have any decent deals going that might work well.
I don't want to buy anything right now. I want to use parts I currently have on hand.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hypervisors have stupidly low IOPS requirements.
It would be like cooking a hot dog by standing behind a fighter jet as it preps to take off.
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@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hypervisors have stupidly low IOPS requirements.
It would be look cooking a hotdog by standing behind a fight jet as it preps to take off.
hahaha .. ok then it's settled. I'll just throw in the SAS drives. I guess I'm being silly about this...
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
Then do a simple OBR6. OBR10 is great, but you're halving your available storage. In a lab do you really need blazing fast storage? Or just more storage to test different things on. . .
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How many drives do you have at the moment?
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hypervisors have stupidly low IOPS requirements.
It would be look cooking a hotdog by standing behind a fight jet as it preps to take off.
hahaha .. ok then it's settled. I'll just throw in the SAS drives. I guess I'm being silly about this...
Yup, a bit silly. Some things to think about below. Just because this is a lab, doesn't mean that you shouldn't think of it like production because the purpose is to be learning and doing weird or anti-production things in the lab is fine, as long as you have a reason for doing it and are thinking things through. Since splitting your array only hurts your lab and you'd never do that in production - it makes no sense.
So here are some of the things to reflect on when you were considing violating normal advice (that you knew about) to do something odd ....
- You are trying to tweak something that has no reason to be tweaked. You are violating the KISS principle and in IT, simplicity is a far bigger deal than in most fields.
- You didn't look at the actual system to see how it would behave, so I'm guessing you ran off of emotions instead of logic and analytics, because what you proposed produces the opposite value to what you stated that you wanted.
- You took a known, very applicable rule of thumb and did the opposite, but without stating a reason for it.
All three of these things are flags you should look for in your decision making processes. This is where your lab can help you to grow the most. Reflect on why you wanted to do this and think about why you thought it sounded good, did you really think about how the system worked, did you really believe you were an exception from the standard rules? If so, why? Did you have bad info, did you run on emotion, etc.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
So you have spare bays? That's a bit different. If you have extra bays, and spare drives, and nowhere else to use them... then whatever. How many spare bays do you have after you use up your 15K drives? A RAID 1 might not make sense. A larger RAID 5 might make sense (with the SSDs) and put some VHDs there.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hyper-V loads into memory no need to put it on fast expensive disk. If you're talking about putting VMs on this then that would make more sense.
Wow... I'm late to the party.
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@dustinb3403 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
Then do a simple OBR6. OBR10 is great, but you're halving your available storage. In a lab do you really need blazing fast storage? Or just more storage to test different things on. . .
Dustin is correct. For a lab, RAID 10 doesn't matter (99.99% of the time) but capacity does. RAID 6 will give you more capacity (and give you the option of an odd number of drives.) Speed isn't important in labs, but capacity is.
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@coliver said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Hyper-V loads into memory no need to put it on fast expensive disk. If you're talking about putting VMs on this then that would make more sense.
Wow... I'm late to the party.
Just a tad.
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@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Couple terminology pieces...
Your HV is what runs the system, not the OS. Hyper-V is an HV, Windows is an OS. Your OSes are in your VMs and will go on the big RAID array. Your HV alone, which is tiny and has no performance needs, is what will go on the SSD array.
They are not partitions, they are arrays. Partitions are a completely different, but very specific, concept.
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@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:
My thinking is that I'd like the OS partition to be fast as possible, because why not.
Because this is totally useless and has no purpose and goes against everything. It will make the things that matter slow while speeding up the thing you will never use. It wastes capacity and you don't have very much of that to spare.
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/02/slow-os-drives-fast-data-drives/
Yeah I'm already aware of that. My limitation now is that I don't have 8 drives of the desired capacity to make OBR10. So I'm just setting up a RAID1 volume for the OS. Then it comes down to the question I made my post about.
So you have spare bays? That's a bit different. If you have extra bays, and spare drives, and nowhere else to use them... then whatever. How many spare bays do you have after you use up your 15K drives? A RAID 1 might not make sense. A larger RAID 5 might make sense (with the SSDs) and put some VHDs there.
I put all this in my original post
I have 8 bays in my R510. Right now, I just want to install Hyper-V, on a single drive, or two drives in RAID1. Then later, when I have a chance, I'm going to acquire 6 high capacity drives to put in a RAID10 which I can use for storage to hold virtual machines.
