Advice on M.2 NVMe Drives for Use in a Home Server?

gregoinc on 13/04/2023 - 21:18
Last edited 13/04/2023 - 21:20

I have a home Proxmox server running an EPYC CPU and I want to add some M.2 NVME drives. So I purchased an ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card. Why PCIe 3.0, because the server has X16 PCIe 3.0 slots available.

I am interested in purchasing M.2 drives with a minimum of 2TB capacity, and I figured purchasing PCIe 4.0 drives was a good way to future proof, seeing as PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives are backwards compatible with PCIe 3.0.

I have been looking at the following drives…

WD_BLACK 2TB SN770 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen4 PCIe
CORSAIR MP600 GS 2TB PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe 4.0 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD

So, the question… given the hardware config above, what PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives would be the most cost effective, and give the best performance?

Computing Computer Component Corsair Crucial M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Western Digital

Comments

  • pinchies on 13/04/2023 - 21:44
    +1

    What workload are you expecting on the drives? What is the maximum continuous write size expected? Is this a boot drive, or will you be software RAID'ing these?

    • gregoinc on 13/04/2023 - 21:50

      Regarding workload… I'd say they'd mostly be home drives for virtual machines, docker, etc. Will they be boot drives… no, the motherboard has another NVMe drive slot that I will most likely use as the boot drive.

      The Asus card can hold 4 x M.2 drives so I was considering RAID 0 pairs of M.2 drives i.e. mirroring the 2 x M.2 drives. The first pair of NVMe drives will likely be 2TB, and then I will look for possible bargain 4TB M.2 drives for the second pair.

      • pinchies on 13/04/2023 - 21:56

        Then I don't understand your question:

        " what PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives would be the most cost effective, and give the best performance?"

        You're compromising on cost effectiveness by specifying best performance, and further again by wanting to "future proof". Best performance would be any Gen 4 drive — the ones you have listed are all pretty good. But for your requirements it sounds like you would probably be completely fine with a QLC Gen 3 drive. About half the cost of Gen 4 drives.

        The best compromise is probably going to be take a look at camelcamelcamel and see which gen4 drive has the lowest price, and aim to snag the next deal on that drive.

        The P5 Plus has DRAM, which might explain why it is slightly more expensive, but all 3 drives benchmark well, and the SN770 is certainly no slouch.

        • gregoinc on 13/04/2023 - 22:06

          Yes, fair comments. I figured with recent discounts in prices going Gen 4 might not be a big cost. I was originally considering Crucial P5 Gen 3 drives, as I've used them for a whole range of jobs and they have been bullet proof. Interestingly, I had also been looking at the Team MP34 4TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen3 SSD.

          So if I get what you are saying, the lowest priced QLC Gen 3 drive might be the way to go?

          • pinchies on 13/04/2023 - 22:08
            +1

            @gregoinc: For a boot drive, certainly not, but for low-write intensive applications, with only a few VM's running at once, I think you'd be perfectly fine with the cheap . With cost per TB so low, and the scarcity of nvme slots, I agree to consider the 4TB drives too.

            These 2TB TLC are also good quality for the price too
            https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/767122

  • garetz on 14/04/2023 - 01:06
    +1

    Ive got a CORSAIR MP600 and they are garbage, i would get the crucial p5.

  • gregoinc on 16/04/2023 - 11:29

    Ended up pulling the trigger on this deal… so will wait to see what happens. I have a whole heap of other bits to arrive for the server I am building, so will some time before I trial it.

    Thanks to everyone for your input.

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