Use Samsung Evo 860 SSD in small NAS?

[bvz]

Hi,

Sorry if this has been asked before but the forum won't let me search for evo or ssd because they are too short.

I am thinking of getting a synology ds419slim and populating it with some 2TB Samsung EVO 860 SSD's (starting with 2 drives configured using Synology Hybrid Raid but growing over time as needed). I currently have a ds216j with two 3.5" spinning rust drives and it serves most of my purposes well enough (more about this below).

My use case is mostly for data storage for a number of computers, but not computers that are generally used simultaneously. In other words, I would probably be writing to the NAS from my laptop and then, the next day, be switching to a desktop and continuing to work on the same data. For the most part I would not expect the drives to get much more writing time than if they were in a desktop system.

I do, of course, want the data to be safe and reliable - comparable reliability (or better) than my ds216j setup with RAID 1 (I've had a single drive fail on that one after a year, but since then it has been solid).

Does this sound like a bad idea? I know people generally discourage the use of desktop drives in a NAS, but I figure that was because of two reasons:

1) Power management on mechanical hard drives is different between desktop drives and NAS level drives
2) Excessive use by all the machines on the LAN in a small office can put additional wear on the drives

In my case, since they are SSD's I thought that maybe #1 was no longer an issue. And because of my use case (basically just using the NAS as long term storage and as an external drive for a single user) that #2 was also not a big issue.

Thanks!



(The reason I am considering this switch is that I want a smaller system because I intend to do some longer term traveling and need to bring additional storage with me and figured I may as well bring my entire data set along, and I prefer the idea of a system that uses as little power as possible - the ds216j is set up to power down and sleep - but I'd like to reduce that even more).


Edit:

I am open to suggestions for other small form factor NAS' as well (not just the ds419slim - but I really like that size)

 

[L&LD]

The main reason desktop-class SSD's don't get recommended for NAS use is because of the total writes written. The firmware for the NAS specific drives not only accounts for this, but they also have a higher drive writes per day or total bytes written. They have to account for NAS use because most NAS os's do not have TRIM enabled (I'm sure that is changing quickly though) and that just amplifies and speeds up the degradation to the chips.

For example, the Seagate Ironwolf 110 NAS SSD is rated at 3,500TB TBW while the Samsung Evo 860 is rated for 1,200TB TBW. These are both for the 2TB SSD's (smaller capacity SSD's have smaller TBW ratings).

However, don't think that saving a bit of money and using the NAS less will offset the lower Endurance of the Samsung EVO. Those specifications are for NAS vs. normal laptop or desktop usage and can't be compared directly (I would assume half or less of the TBW rating, and that would be only if the NAS os had TRIM enabled too for the desktop-class EVO).

Use the NAS you want. But don't skimp on the SSD drives if you want your data to be safe too.

 

[bvz]

Thank you for the thorough explanation.

Seems like I will look at NAS ready SSD's. And if it is too expensive I will just lug around my ds216j till the prices come down.

Thanks.

Edit:

Just saw a WD Red NAS ready 1TB SSD for only $10 more than the EVO. So the price difference really isn't all that much anyway. Thanks again.

 

[avtella]

The WD Red SSD vs a 860 EVO won’t make much difference neither have power loss protection and TBWs aren’t too far off, if anything Samsung is usually pretty conservative in TBW estimates. The Samsung probably has better/more consistent performance as the drive starts to fill. The WD Red is just a WD Blue with possibly some firmware tweaks, from reviews I’ve seen. Between the two I’d actually go for the Samsung if at equal prices. Both will last much longer than the “Warrantied TBW”. You can increase OP to get much higher TBW if needed, plus any empty space is used as OP by the controller anyway.

The Micron 1100 lower end enterprise drive and its consumer version the Crucial MX500 both have capacitors for a certain degree of power loss protection. Both of these have much lower warrantied TBW than the other two above but still good drives.

Now Iron Wolf has power failure protection and are higher tier drives. Also have more factory default overprovisioning (hence why you have 1.92 TB usable vs 2 TB on most standard drives) to increase drive life. A nice chunk of the write endurance comes from the extra factory OP. And those also probably use eTLC, just higher quality TLC NAND.

TLDR: If it’s just home use then get the EVO or any decent SSD, unless you have some need for power loss protection or unusually high write loads, in which case something like the IronWolf / IronWolf Pro or Samsung Enterprise drives would be better.

 

[bvz]

avtella,

Thanks for the detailed info.

I think then, in the light of your explanation, that I might go for the Samsung drives. The write load I have on these drives is going to be VERY low. Essentially I am a single user (my wife will on rare occasion write to the NAS, but on the order of megabytes per month) and even my write loads are going to be minimal. I generally don't write all that much data day to day unless I have picked up a side gig. So I suspect that my usage would be measured in megabytes per day (at most a gigabyte) on average - in the form of months of nothing written and then a short burst of a few tens of gigabytes per day for a few weeks. From my calculations, the Samsung 2TB would last me about 32 years even if I wrote 100GB a day every single day.

And I will be using it in a RAID array to improve data reliability. I also run an offline backup (both cloud based as well as external drives) on top of it. Data integrity is important to me, but my needs and expectations are in line with what I would expect from a local drive on my local machine.

Thanks again! Now I just have to decide whether the cost is worth the portability/energy savings. Somehow I feel more comfortable with this upgrade than continuing to rely on my ds216j and its spinning rust (perhaps because one of them already died and I am just gun shy now).

 

[L&LD]

@bvz I'll quote myself the important info for your consideration.

However, don't think that saving a bit of money and using the NAS less will offset the lower Endurance of the Samsung EVO. Those specifications are for NAS vs. normal laptop or desktop usage and can't be compared directly (I would assume half or less of the TBW rating, and that would be only if the NAS os had TRIM enabled too for the desktop-class EVO).

 

[bvz]

You did say that...

So maybe the RED drives after all.

 

[avtella]

You did say that...

So maybe the RED drives after all.

It’s actually not that black and white. Not all NAS SSDs are true enterprise for lack of a better word. In this case Red and EVO can definitely be compared even TBW wise, even with enterprise oriented firmware tweaks on the Blue making it Red. The EVO has a superior controller and from the few reviews I saw, more consistent performance as the drive fills. As previously mentioned TBW for both is decent and will last much longer than warrantied, Samsung is generally more conservative. For what it's worth I use a mix of 2xToshiba's HDDs and 2xSSDs in my Netgear ReadyNAS 524X, my SSDs being the much older Crucial MX100s from 2014, I'm considering getting 860 EVOs myself as they're cheaper for me with discounts, I was about to get the Reds until I looked past the labeling and did some more research and figured not much difference.

Don’t simply go by labels especially after what multiple drive manufacturers including WD pulled with SMR drives advertising them for RAID, they backtracked after some outrage and enough testing by reviewers.

Here’s what ServeTheHome said at the end of their review:
“Overall, the WD Red SA500 1TB drive strikes an odd impression; it does not feel much like a NAS focused SSD. Instead, it seems more like a standard consumer SSD that has just been given a coat of Red paint.”


Also when L&LD talks about garbage collection and endurance, A combination of a better controller and extra OP (sometimes in the form of just less user space and sometimes actual extra NAND) allow some of the better enterprise drives to perform more consistently even with a lack of TRIM, and have lower write amplification and better endurance. Some of the higher end drives also use eTLC. The Red doesn’t have any of these advantages over the EVO other than only a slightly higher paper TBW (warranty) not actual life.

For home use as I said before either is fine. Go for which ever is priced better honestly, they are both at the same tier.

As for actual warranty service, I never had failures with Samsung so I can’t comment on them but I’ve returned quite a few consumer WDs (HDDs a while back) and I can say they had an excellent cross shipping service and very responsive.

 

[avtella]

@L&LD After speaking to a person I know who deals with enterprise drives the information was that endurance is endurance that is listed, regardless of how one may use the drive, there's no special calculation based on enterprise use. Infact WD itself also confirmed the same in fact. Additionally my contact also clarified that the Red is in infact merely a Blue that is "warrantied" for more writes but no physical difference as in both should last the same in use just that WD won't give you warranty past like 400 TB on the Blue...

I'm not pursuing this discussion to be mean, but because I was confused by you earlier statement about "NAS specifications vs laptop specifications" and ended up looking further into this and I didn't want anyone else to be misinformed....

 

[L&LD]

Thanks, @avtella, but that isn't the distinction I was making. I'm not stating enterprise vs. other types of uses. I'm stating that NAS use and other uses are different. I think that is important when considering a drive specifically for NAS use.

'Regardless of how you use the drive' isn't how warranties are enforced, ime. The drive must be used as designed or else there is effectively no warranty.

 

[avtella]

Yeah you make a good point I recall that was the case with HDDs where some manufacturers, like Hitachi (when still independent) could deny warranty based on how much the drive was used if consumer drives were running like 24/7 for months on end they could consider that enterprise level use, but with SSDs they use TBWs as the equivalent limiting factor, including Samsung and WD.

 

[sfx2000]

I am thinking of getting a synology ds419slim and populating it with some 2TB Samsung EVO 860 SSD's (starting with 2 drives configured using Synology Hybrid Raid but growing over time as needed). I currently have a ds216j with two 3.5" spinning rust drives and it serves most of my purposes well enough (more about this below).

Not sure you would see any performance improvement with SSD vs. HD's...

The bottleneck on the DS419Slim is not the drives, it's the Armada 385 and the gigabit network interface.

Then it's really down to the amount of storage vs. price - SSD prices are coming down, no doubt, but spinning rust is still the price/performance winner here.

 

[coxhaus]

I would think to tap the SSD you would need a multi-gig network. 1 gig is too slow for an SSD but I have no actual experience.

 

[L&LD]

Depending on the SSD and implementation (i.e. number of PCIe 4.0 SSD's in RAID0), 100GbE is too slow.

 

[coxhaus]

Well Cisco is working on a 400Gb interface.

 

[L&LD]

Four times faster connection isn't really increasing the speeds (substantially). Not when PCIe 5.0 is already in testing and I'm sure a few secret locations around the world are creating/testing the SSD's to match.

Of course, this is all in fun here, the power these would draw and the cooling they will require is the true limiting factor. But 1GbE and 10GbE interconnects were already surpassed with mechanical HDDs. I'm not sure if something like google, amazon, or azure would be using enough HDDs to surpass the 100GbE and 400GbE interfaces at once, yet? I'd guess the answer is yes, but the small files that 'transactions' use requires the use of SSDs to at least cache those types of transfers too, to saturate as fully as possible those fastest interfaces.

 

[avtella]

Mellanox (now nVidia) already has 400Gbe switch ports along with Cisco and I think juniper, and Mellanox has dual port 200Gbe (per port) ConnectX-6 adapters that have been out for some time, they require an add on PCIE daughterboard connected to the main via ribbon cable to take advantage of 32x PCIE4 lanes. Additionally the 800 Gbe working group only recently released specifications this spring I believe.

 

[rafale77]

I actually can see that SSDs provide a huge boost in performance in NAS use, not just for sustained throughput but also for random seek latencies. The endurance is the greatest concern with these SSDs but must be put within context and comparison of their HDD equivalents. The wear of the mechanical drive is affected not just during writes but during read as well. If you only look at the medium itself, then sure the SSDs appear to have a shorter lifetime but how many of us have had hard drives fail for reasons others than the magnetic medium? There are so many more moving parts in the hard drives which can fail.
As it turns out, the most recent SSDs may actually have a longer lifetime in servers than their HDD equivalent even with QLC.

Look towards the end of this article:

Micron 5210 Ion Enterprise SSD Review

Micron's low-cost 4-bit per cell enterprise SSD is a hit for machine learning and low write endurance workloads.

www.tweaktown.com

With a 10Gbe NAS, my hard drives in a 4 drives RAID5 array are by far the performance bottleneck.

 

[CraigBee]

I use an Asustor NAS with 2.5gbe interface with four Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB drives in RAID 5. It works great. If I were to upgrade my NAS, it would be to an Asustor AS4004T for the 10gbe interface.

 

[EZerrano]

The Samsung support told me regarding my question to use an eco 60 in an external enclosure (not NAS):

the drive is meant to be an internal drive. the drives are not tested in an external RAID environment so we don't have information if garbage collection is enough for this task
unfortunately, since the drives are not tested in this environment there is no one to provide that information.

I will try it anyways since I have 2 spare SSDs from my previous PC.
What are your actual experience ? And what about TRIM ?