Best 2TB SSD drives?

[plantsandbinary]

I'm getting sick of the performance of my WD REDs. I have 4x 4TB of them (3 + Parity) and the 130MB/s speeds just aren't cutting it. I've upgraded my local network and ethernet to 2.5GbE and these drives, whilst insanely reliable are starting to show that they are absolutely the weakest link in my home server.

 

I realise that people will tell me to just use a bigger cache drive but with the mover just moving everything off the cache, I usually have to move files manually back onto it. I do realise I can also permanently set a specific share to "always" be on the cache. But for massive 80GB 4K movies this doesn't really seem like a suitable option for me either. I do have a 2TB cache drive and I don't think it's really worth it buying an even larger one.

 

The biggest problem I'm having is the lack of good I/O performance and read speeds. When it comes to watching movies via Plex etc. it's always complaining that the drives aren't fast enough. Plus with other things running like Torrents downloading etc. the I/O performance is split between the tasks.

 

So I was thinking of grabbing a 4x 2TB of these: https://store.patriotmemory.com/products/copy-of-new-patriot-p400-lite-m-2-2280-pcie-gen4-x4-solid-state-drive-1

 

They're 100€ a pop with free postage in my country. I also rationalised that I don't need as much storage, I'm only using about 1.2TB per drive at the moment, so they're largely under-utilised.

 

They aren't the fastest SATA SSDs but they have pretty good reviews. I could get up to about 30MB/s read and 90MB/s faster write speeds if I went with the Crucial MX500 drives but they're also quite a bit more expensive per drive.

 

Any arguments against them? I checked also the Crucial BX500 which are close in price but I was seeing wildly ranging views from people saying that they die very quickly. The Patriots seemed a bit slower overall but much longer lasting (960TB write capacity vs. 640TB respectively on most other cheap drives).

 

Thoughts? Especially from anyone who is running all SSDs in their machine, would be really appreciated.

Edited February 19, 2023 by plantsandbinary

[whipdancer]

I don't think it's complaining the drives aren't fast enough. I'm streaming 4k UHD from lots of different drives. The drives are not the problem.

Edited February 19, 2023 by whipdancer

[Decto]

AFAIK you can't use SSDs in the normal array as the TRIM function would break parity.

 

I'd agree with above, likely something to do with hardware config but without any hardware details is difficult to offer any suggestions.

 

The other issue may just be the open number of reads / writes on the array if you are torrenting directly  folders you are also trying to view content from.

I have newsgroups which download to a cache drive and then populate the array overnight so never an issue.

 

One option may be a large SSD cache pool where you keep any active (torrent) files with the folder set to cache only. 

You could then use the existing array for long term storage / archive.

 

 

[plantsandbinary]

>AFAIK you can't use SSDs in the normal array as the TRIM function would break parity.

 

This is a pretty huge setback. I wonder how Unraid would attempt to mitigate this problem then in the future as this is going to be a pretty massive setback as SSDs become cheaper. I guess I will just figure out about having a much larger cache drive and keeping movies there that I need to watch before moving them onto the slower drives.

Edited February 20, 2023 by plantsandbinary

[JorgeB]

SSDs are best used in pools, btrfs for now, btrfs and zfs when 6.12 is released.