Hey folks, I’m at my wits end. I’ve been screwing with proxmox for years now, but I’m at a tipping point. I’ve just used consumer SSDs in it to run my VMs off of - but I just realized after a dozen or so crashes over the last week that I think the SSDs are the culprit. (Really, really terrible write speeds leading to kernel crashes I believe).
I’ve never gotten an enterprise SSD, if that’s even what I need. Any recommendations? New? Used? Brands?
Appreciate it
Really. Anything branded from Samsung or Crucial(Micron) is going to be fine. They are the top producers of NAND, produce high quality products, and stand behind warranties. But you are gonna pay out the nose for the privilege of enterprise grade hardware.
You might just be buying lower quality consumer SSD’s though, since even they should be able to handle a surprising amount of abuse.
How do you know you’re getting higher quality? When you’re looking at them they all seem the same
I recently upgraded three of my proxmox hosts with SSDs to make use of ceph. While researching I faced the same question - everyone said you need an enterprise SSD, or ceph would eat it alive. The feature that apparently matters the most in my case is Power Loss Protection (PLP). It’s not even primarily needed to protect from an possible outage, but it forces sync writes instead of relying on a cache for performance.
There are some SSDs marketed for usage in data centers, these are generally enterprisey. Often they are classified for “Mixed Use” (read and write) or “Read Intensive”. Other interesting metrics are the Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) and obviously TBW and IOPS.
At the end I went with used Samsung PM883.
But before you fall into this rabbit hole, you might check if you really need an enterprise SSD. If all you’re doing is running a few vms in a homelab, I would expect consumer SSDs to work just fine.