Enterprise M.2 VM storage options

[Overfill4993]

As I have watched how my Firecuda 530 drives get burned through (7% wear currently, accumulated in 18 months) I have started the process of finding alternatives. It is easy to find U.3 and U.2 drives for my needs, but I'd rather stay with M.2 (reasoning below). E1.S would also be an option if there were any dual drive adapters for PCI-e slots, but I haven't found any.

So far I have found these options in M.2 formfactor:
- Micron 7450 Pro (1.92TB and 3.84TB)
- Micron 7450 Max (800GB)
- Samsung PM9A3 (not sure if I trust their firmwares anymore, even though this model seems better than the PM983)

M.2 is currently the formfactor of choice for me because of:
- Reasonable power consumption even for enterprise drives
- I already have Asus Hyper M.2 card and 2 M.2 slots on MB

 

[s.lendl]

I have the Micron 7450 Max in my Workstation and the performance is impressive due to the power loss protection.

 

[Dunuin]

Only other options would be Solidigm P4511/P4801X, Kingston DC1000B (bad DWPD), Micron 7300/7400 Pro/Max.

 

[leesteken]

I don't know why you mentions specific sizes but Micron 7450 Pro also comes in smaller sizes (both length and GBs and price), as does the Max.

 

[Overfill4993]

I don't know why you mentions specific sizes but Micron 7450 Pro also comes in smaller sizes (both length and GBs and price), as does the Max.

Yes I am aware, but I prefer a bit more write endurance than those models provide. Even though they have PLP, their write endurance is really nothing special. Having made that specific mistake once already I am now trying to find a "buy once, cry once" solution that will be cheapest in the long run.

Only other options would be Solidigm P4511/P4801X, Kingston DC1000B (bad DWPD), Micron 7300/7400 Pro/Max.

Thanks for these! I'll add these to the list.

It seems though that industry really has moved on from the M.2 formfactor in the enterprise side of things. My go to is probably Micron 7450 Pro 1.92TB or Max 800GB. Now I just need to find them in stock somewhere...

E: Aren't those Intel/Solidigm P4510-series drives the notorious ones that have weird performance characteristics when used in raid?

E2: Just found a good deal on some 3.84TB 7400 Pro drives and ordered two instantly. I think those solve my problems for a long time. Thanks all for help!

 

[Dunuin]

It seems though that industry really has moved on from the M.2 formfactor in the enterprise side of things

M.2 is a terrible form factor that was designed for laptops. All it was about was to have no cables and a small footprint to allow those superflat laptops.

When using servers or even consumer desktops you don't really care about the size and something hot-swapable with a bigger footprint for lots of supercaps for PLP, more NAND chips for higher capacity and better performance and more space for heatsinks, so they don't thermal throttle all the time, would be way better.

I think the main problem was that building a PCIe cable that is robust and reliable enought isn't cheap to manufacture so stuff like U.2 never made it to the consumer market.

But at least you got that PCIe card. If I would need to replace my M.2s I would need to remove all those PCIe cards like NICs and GPUs first as the mainboards M.2 slots are block by them.

 

[Overfill4993]

M.2 is a terrible form factor that was designed for laptops. All it was about was to have no cables and a small footprint to allow those superflat laptops.

When using servers or even consumer desktops you don't really care about the size and something hot-swapable with a bigger footprint for lots of supercaps for PLP, more NAND chips for higher capacity and better performance and more space for heatsinks, so they don't thermal throttle all the time, would be way better.

I think the main problem was that building a PCIe cable that is robust and reliable enought isn't cheap to manufacture so stuff like U.2 never made it to the consumer market.

But at least you got that PCIe card. If I would need to replace my M.2s I would need to remove all those PCIe cards like NICs and GPUs first as the mainboards M.2 slots are block by them.

I agree on M.2 being terrible in the point of view of an enterprise customer. Enterprise and consumer needs tend to vary quite a lot and personally I can see way more positive sides for M.2 enterprise drives than U.2/U.3.

U.2/U.3 uses quite a lot of power, has said adapter/cabling problems and there basically are no out of the box reasonably priced solutions for hobbyist to even take advantage of the potential storage density.

M.2 however...
- Is limited in power consumption because of its design origins
- Offers enough storage density for any hobbyist
- Has no connectivity problems

Maybe in a few years the E1.S formfactor arrives in consumer markets too and we get "best of the both worlds" combined in that. Until then, U.2 and U.3 just don't make sense for my perspective. I just hope that some company would start to produce "Asus Hyper E1.S" cards.

 

[Dunuin]

U.2/U.3 uses quite a lot of power

But thats more a firmware thing as an enterprise SSD should perform well 24/7 and often don't got power saving features as waking the SSD up would add some latency. The same when using many Enterprise SATA SSDs that got a very high idle power consumption. My guess would be, that if any Consumer U.2 would exist, they would be very power efficient too.

reasonably priced solutions for hobbyist to even take advantage of the potential storage density.

M.2 storage density is very low. In case your board only allows for max M.2 2280 you are limited to max 960GB when using Enterprise SSDs, as the supercaps of the PLP need lots of space that is then missing for those additional NAND chips. Everything above is 22110 form factor and often with NAND on both sides of the PCB so you can't put a heatsink on half of your NAND chips. And even then you are limited to 4TB which isn't that much these days with a movies being 50GB, a song 60MB and a game 150GB.