Best SSDs, SSD or NVMe

[jbaileypro]

Hi all,

Building a couple of new VM hosts. Both will be Dell R710 servers 96GB Ram, Dual 6 core Xeons, Perc H700 raid controllers.

I'm currently looking at SSDs for guest VM boot disks. One VM is a terminal server. I've tried a samsung 850 evo previously and found that it struggles for multiple VMs at the same time.

I'm looking at either:
2x Intel DC S4500 Sata SSD in Raid 1
or
1x Samsung 960 Pro NVMe (in PCIe adaptor)
or
1x Intel P4501 U.2 SSD (in PCIe adaptor)
or
1x Intel 900P 280GB PCIe AIC
or
1x Kingston KC1000 PCIe AIC

Should I just go for Intel SSDs designed for servers? There won't be too much data writing but general speed of the terminal server would be a great benefit. VMs stored in the SSDs will be backed up every night and no data important data is stored on them (eg user profiles or shared data).

Thanks,

 

[tom]

We can only recommend data center/enterprise class SSD, e.g.:

Intel:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...rage/solid-state-drives/data-center-ssds.html

Samsung:
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/enterprise/overview/

We run a lot of SM863 in our testlab with quite good results.

 

[NewDude]

We run a lot of SM863 in our testlab with quite good results.

That's what I went as it was more affordable. I'm not unhappy with the performance I'm seeing using that as a SLOG (not a dedicated boot drive). I believe the SM863 is optimized for writes, but the PM863 is optimized for reads. Google it.

 

[jbaileypro]

Thanks for the replies. Has anyone used/recommend any NVMe style drives? The current config will use up all 6 3.5" dray bays?