600GB VR vs. 256GB Samsung 470 SSD?

[Zillatech]

The drive will be dedicated for running VMs concurrently, (Servers, Clients, etc.)

I'm leaning towards the Samsung because in the end its only about $170.00 more but I'm concerned about running out of disk space. Can you actually use most of a SSD without taking a performance hit unlike conventional spindle drives?

Another thing is I'm putting this in an older X38 Intel MB w/ SATA 3Gb/s and will most likely use (2) Samsungs, one for the OS and the other for VM's with a third 1TB spindle drive for Data

I assume I'm going to beat the hell out the SSD with VM's but if the performance increase saves me time and allows me to plow through labs and do testing much faster than it would be worth it.

What should I do? I'm also open to suggestions other than the Samsung 470 but I need something reliable and consistent.

 

[Emulex]

esxi vmfs doesn't care about physicals it can deal with two separate drives quite fine.

you need more space. snapshots and general overhead can sometimes get very expensive depending on the hypervisor. some snaps get expensive.

why don't you do what i'd do and create 2 datastores 1 SSD and 1 hard drive and move them in between.

sata drives suck ballz for vm's big time. didn't realize it till i built a server with RE4's (typically i use 15K SAS drives in raid-10) man i've never had vmotion timeouts until SATA.

In my better judgement i should have known better. so i use it to park unused vm's and bulk storage but not for running active vm's.

just my thoughts.

 

[Zillatech]

I'm using VMware workstation for testing purposes so I'll only be working with a 1-2 VM's at a time and I probably won't keep extensive snapshots. I figure I can move unused VM's to my 1TB Data drive so I'm thinking I can make the SSD work but the more input from others the better. I found the Samsung's for about $450.00 again and I'm wanting to order but thought I'd ask the question before I shell out more $$$.

 

[Emulex]

sounds like a solid plan. I shutdown and vmotion junk i'm not using to sata raid-10 on a ML150 server with 16 gb of ram. just be careful of load on the single drive when you migrating back and forth. vmware gets pissed if things take too long.

 

[Jamsan]

I went the route of SATA drives in RAID-10 myself. My setup is only for testing (Workstation as well), so I wasn't overly concerned with performance. I did 4 1TB drives in RAID 10 - total usable of 1.8TB or so. This is plenty of space to store lots of VM's and snapshots. I've had about 4-5 VMs running at the same without any real issue (main system is an i7, 8GB of memory, and the R10 storage). Mostly Win2k3/Win2k8 Server boxes running anything from DC services, IIS, SQL Server 08, Exchange, etc. and a few clients (XP/7).

4 Samsung F3's will run you about $260 shipped - should leave you with another $190 or so for a RAID controller (might want to up the budget a little more).

This is all assuming you have the room for 4 drives and the controller.

 

[Zillatech]

I have limited physical space in my case so I really can't do a multi-drive RAID setup, that will be in my next build. I'm just looking for raw performance in a single drive. It's really down to the VelociRaptor vs. the SSD. I'm just trying to justify the cost I suppose.

I was hoping Intel would come out with 300/600GB SSDs but they seem to be delayed or canceled all together. I'm disappointed they used a 3rd party controller instead of their own. What happened to the SSD Roadmap ???

 

[SickBeast]

I would take the SSD, personally.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the new Hitachi 2tb 7200rpm drives with 667gb platters are faster than the raptor pretty much across the board (aside from seek times, which would be faster on an SSD anyways).

OP you should look into the Hitachi drive. They're $120 or so. You should also check out how the WD Black drives compare. The velociraptor is quite old, and is probably about the same speed as current regular drives in most tasks.

 

[Owls]

Get the LSI 9260-4i as your raid controller. Sata 6GB/s, more RAM, and a faster processor than the Areca.

 

[Zillatech]

I think I've decided to go with the SSD, the VelociRaptors are just too expensive for what you get anymore. If only Anand would do a review of the Samsung 470 with the current firmware revision to see if it improved the "TRIM" support issue that Tech Report found.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20087/5

I talked to Samsung support and they indicated there have been two firmware revisons since the Tech Report review and that one of them did improve TRIM support. I can't find a single review on the web that has tested a SS 470 with the current firmware.

 

[aceO07]

I was hoping Intel would come out with 300/600GB SSDs but they seem to be delayed or canceled all together. I'm disappointed they used a 3rd party controller instead of their own. What happened to the SSD Roadmap ???

I was definitely waiting for the bigger Intel SSDs with encryption.