Upgrades to my new PC?

[P1]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

Yeah, it's crazy how much these drives cost. Fortunately because of work, I have a relationship with Intel. So they gave me a couple of these drives to play with in my lab and to hand out to customers for testing.

They dropped me two of the 1.6TB P3608 drives and two of the 2TB P3700s.

Micron has been doing the same. They dropped me their 3.2TB 9100 series NVMe drives in both PCIe and 2.5" U.2 form factors.

If you haven't seen it yet, look for my thread about fun with SSDs in this subforum. I did a test with I think either 5 or 6 Micron DC630 1.92TB 12Gb SAS drives in a Windows Storage Spaces configuration. It's pretty sick.

ETA: Just thought of something I might try. Putting some of the NVMe SSDs I have on hand into a Storage Spaces setup to see how fast that configuration is.

I was looking at the Intel SSDs. Are those more for enterprise use vs. home use? I understand SSDs have a somewhat limited lifespan, and unless I'm mistaken, the Intel or Micron drives will outlast drives such as the Samsung EVOs?

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by P1et

I was looking at the Intel SSDs. Are those more for enterprise use vs. home use? I understand SSDs have a somewhat limited lifespan, and unless I'm mistaken, the Intel or Micron drives will outlast drives such as the Samsung EVOs?

I think Intel makes a consumer line along with Micron.

Intel unfortunately only has SATA SSDs on the market in the 2.5" form factor. The 2.5" SSDs I have as samples from Intel are in their enterprise line. One of the models I have is the S3710. Build quality is much better than your consumer SSD drive even the heralded Samsung EVOs. The enclosure of the S3710 is pretty thick aluminum. It's almost a block of aluminum. What you've stated about life span is correct concerning SSDs. Enterprise drives have a rating called DWPD (drive writes per day). A drive which is rated as 1 DWPD with a capacity of 250GB means the drive can sustain 250GB of data written to it daily for I think a minimum of 3 years if not 5. The higher quality enterprise drives will have at least a rating of 3 DWPD and some times higher.

DWPD is one differentiation for enterprise drives. Another is dealing with garbage collection. Consumer grade drives lean heavily on the OS to have TRIM functionality to clean up flash cells with data marked for deletion. Enterprise drives have their own garbage collection functionality which assists in clearing out flash cells with data marked to be deleted. Depending on the I/O profile, the OS may not initiate TRIM before more write I/O is dumped onto the SSD. This causes a phenomena called the "write cliff" write performance literally drops off the cliff when the SSD reaches capacity and has to have marked cells cleared off.

Another aspect of enterprise SSDs is the thin provisioning. When you buy an enterprise SSD, you're actually buying a bit more capacity than what the drive is rated for. So I'm making up numbers but say you buy that same 250GB enterprise drive. The actual capacity on the drive is 275GB. But you're locked out of utilizing the extra 25GB of storage. The reason the drive has this phantom space is to enable the ability to do wear leveling. It's also there to maintain performance when the drive itself is doing garbage collection so performance won't take a hit as there will always be enough available space to write to without waiting for garbage collection to free up additional space.

[Dang3r]

Maybe ya should consider SSHD's like the FireCudas, I own a 2TB one an be very pleased with it.

[P1]

OK, so a little update. PC is now running two SSD drives and one HDD: one M.2 drive (500GB) made by Samsung that runs only applications, one 1TB Micron drive for my photographs, and one 2TB HDD for my security camera recordings.

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by P1et

OK, so a little update. PC is now running two SSD drives and one HDD: one M.2 drive (500GB) made by Samsung that runs only applications, one 1TB Micron drive for my photographs, and one 2TB HDD for my security camera recordings.

So that's where the 1TB SSD ended up....

[P1]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

So that's where the 1TB SSD ended up....

Where else!

[P1]

Thanks again for all the help folks provided in this thread. After 6 years and running 24/7, this thing never skipped a beat!

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by P1

Thanks again for all the help folks provided in this thread. After 6 years and running 24/7, this thing never skipped a beat!

Glad to see your rig still running strong. I had to scroll back through this as a trip down memory lane.

I've also done some upgrades over the past year. Moved from the old Samsung I think 840 SSD to the Intel data center grade SSD SATA drive. Been running the Micron 3.2TB NVMe U.2 drive as my data/app drive. I upgraded to an RTX 3090Ti Founders Edition GPU. And recently moved everything into a new Fractal Design Pop Air XL RGB case. Starting to think at some point I'll have to upgrade my motherboard, processor, and memory. But as of right now, I'm still able to do the gaming I want even with the latest games.