Best cost-effective SSDs (RAID) for Virtual Machines

[Kushina]

Looking to get about 500GB or so of SSD space for my virtual machines, running multiple servers off hard-drives gets to be painful.

I could run raid, backups will be done to a hard drive, it's just going to be used at home for testing and learning things nothing critical. Looking to spend under $300. I want performance, exchange servers rape your hard drives, could be running anywhere from 2 servers and 1 Win7 machine to 10 servers and 5 or 6 Win7.

I'm sensitive to slow-ness a start menu click that takes more than a second irritates me.

 

[yinan]

You will need more space than that for that many VMs. You will also need more than 1 drive for that much I/O.

 

[ArisVer]

Off topic, I am curious how much memory you have and how much do you allocate for each VM?

 

[redzo]

Running more than one vm from the same mechanical hdd, it turns everything into a stutter fest when all vm's are doing intensive I/O operations, no matter how much RAM you'll allocate to the VM's.

I would go for a high performance consistent ssd like the sandisk extreme pro(or any other consistent ssd's out there)rather than trying to achieve better results in raid0 with cheaper inconsistent ssd's.

Raid0 may be doubling the performance, but doubling the performance is simply not enough when I/O consistent performance is stupidly on the low side on cheaper ssd's.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8170/sandisk-extreme-pro-240gb-480gb-960gb-review

 

[Kushina]

Raid0 may be doubling the performance, but doubling the performance is simply not enough when I/O consistent performance is stupidly on the low side on cheaper ssd's.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8170/sandisk-extreme-pro-240gb-480gb-960gb-review

Right and that's what I'm asking about. I havn't kept up with SSDs since the release of the 840 Pro, I know they have great speeds through out all the tests. I don't want to shell money out on a top of the line SSD for marginal performance. And with the amount of I/O my needs are a bit different than the average joe.

Plus I'm wondering how SSDs handle when they are having alot of things written and read at the same time from different VMs. I don't know if that brings certain ones to their knees or what not.

Off topic, I am curious how much memory you have and how much do you allocate for each VM?

32GB, depends on the server, if it's just AD and regular WinServer stuff 1 or 1.5GB, Win 7 512-1GB.

 

[TechBoyJK]

What are you using for a RAID controller? If on board the motherboard, you're likely looking at RAID 1 at best.

A decent RAID card that will take advantage of SSD performance might break your budget without considering the drives themselves.

I'd likely just RAID 1 (2) affordable SSD drives.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Budget?

4x MLC consumer drives (say, a 512GB BX100) in RAID-10 would be my instinct, unless it's for a production/write-heavy workload. (In which case I'd want the enterprise-grade stuff.)

 

[Ketchup]

SSDs do ok for me. I can have two VMs running at the same time on the computer in my sig without too much fanfare. My work laptop is where I really need the SSD (always running 2 VMs at once, sometimes 3) and speed is often a problem. They have their own partitions, and I think that helps, but they are still mechanical and I/O limitations to deal with.

So I said that to say this: my advice is to not bother with RAID. Get multiple small SSDs as opposed to one large one. I think it should go pretty well for you.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Oh, wait, didn't read the OP enough. $300 doesn't get you a lot of SSD space.

That said, if it's a learning environment, backups are frequent, and datasets are small, a single 512GB SSD is going to do the job. Get one that's known for performance consistency (see Ananadtech reviews.)

With virtualization load and databases, IOPS > sequential IO. Any SSD is going to be able to out-IOPS a medium-to-large HDD array, so I don't think that RAID is really important for this use case.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

With virtualization load and databases, IOPS > sequential IO. Any SSD is going to be able to out-IOPS a medium-to-large HDD array, so I don't think that RAID is really important for this use case.

RAID also introduces more points of failure. In general RAID'ing SSDs should be avoided for two reasons. As mentioned its less reliable, and the higher capacity drives have better performance, because of more physical NAND packages on-board. Cost-wise its generally a wash, you can get two smaller capacity drives, or one large for about the same price.

I'll recommend Samsung 850Pro or Sandisk Extreme Pro. They cost a bit more then the "budget" variety SSD, but have more consistent I/O performance.

 

[jae]

Wow.. I came here to ask the same question for my new server build for my learning environment. I'm looking at 2x 500GB SSD in RAID1. I think I'll go budget consumer SSD route right now, since it won't be very IO intensive.

 

[ggadrian]

What about a 400GB Intel 750? It's around 400$ and should give you plenty of performance for multiple VM.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

What about a 400GB Intel 750? It's around 400$ and should give you plenty of performance for multiple VM.

That would be an awesome solution. But it's also well over OPs budget, and not great from a $/GB standpoint.

It's definitely the best way to get that performance, if you need that performance. OP probably doesn't.

It also might not be on the HCL for whatever hypervisor is being used. (Maybe it is, but that's just something to consider.)

 

[Red Squirrel]

For $300 that will barely even get you a decent HDD raid set, let alone SSD.

Though since it's just a learning environment I would stick with HDDs anyway. Get a couple 1TB HDDs and do a raid 5. I've had good luck with WD Blacks and Hitachi drives. This will still be over your budget though.

 

[XavierMace]

Looking to get about 500GB or so of SSD space for my virtual machines, running multiple servers off hard-drives gets to be painful.

I could run raid, backups will be done to a hard drive, it's just going to be used at home for testing and learning things nothing critical. Looking to spend under $300. I want performance, exchange servers rape your hard drives, could be running anywhere from 2 servers and 1 Win7 machine to 10 servers and 5 or 6 Win7.

I'm sensitive to slow-ness a start menu click that takes more than a second irritates me.

Your performance requirements are in conflict with your budget.

 

[coercitiv]

All he asks for is improved I/O over 7200RPM HDDs in RAID.

Right under $300 there are enough good performming 500GB SSDs, and OP only needs one SSD since this just a learning machine.

 

[yinan]

Learning needs to be fast. It is why my lab server has 8x 500GB SSDs

 

[Kushina]

Oh, wait, didn't read the OP enough. $300 doesn't get you a lot of SSD space.

That said, if it's a learning environment, backups are frequent, and datasets are small, a single 512GB SSD is going to do the job. Get one that's known for performance consistency (see Ananadtech reviews.)

With virtualization load and databases, IOPS > sequential IO. Any SSD is going to be able to out-IOPS a medium-to-large HDD array, so I don't think that RAID is really important for this use case.

I should be able to get 500GB of space easily with $300 these days, you sound like you understand what I'm looking for. I want to get the most IOPS out of this as possible, I don't think the new on-board SATA controllers are that limited in-terms of IOPS, just sequential I/O is where they get saturated. I'm not going to be using it daily or all that often or heavily most of the time. But when I do I just want performance.

Someone else said keep them out of RAID, I see your point but managing multiple volumes gets annoying. I already have enough volumes in my system.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I should be able to get 500GB of space easily with $300 these days, you sound like you understand what I'm looking for. I want to get the most IOPS out of this as possible, I don't think the new on-board SATA controllers are that limited in-terms of IOPS, just sequential I/O is where they get saturated. I'm not going to be using it daily or all that often or heavily most of the time. But when I do I just want performance.

Then a single "good" (not cheapest) SSD should do the job. But, aktoooollleee.... the onboard SATA controllers tend to limit IOPS, not sequential IO.

Someone else said keep them out of RAID, I see your point but managing multiple volumes gets annoying. I already have enough volumes in my system.

Well... yeah. I use RAID too. But adding a single oddball 512GB SSD to your box, what will you RAID it with?? You're adding a new storage type to your system, that means a new volume. (RAID a SSD together with an HDD? It would be as slow as the HDD. Bad news.)

Now, if you have a stack of HDDs already that are all the same size, THOSE you should totally RAID together, for exactly the reasons you described - adminning a single big storage pool is way easier.

 

[Cerb]

960GB: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/crucial-internal-hard-drive-ct960m500ssd1

Most cost-effective at the moment, but very much time-limited. Sales on the remaining 480GB models appear to have dried up, and these one likely won't won't last. If it's $300 per SSD, you won't find a better deal until Sandisk or Micron get 3D NAND out and start competing with Samsung on price.

Near 500GB, sustained high performance, good drives, known to handle RAID well, too:
500GB: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/crucial-internal-hard-drive-ct500mx200ssd1
480GB: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/sandisk-internal-hard-drive-sdssdxps480gg25
480GB: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/intel-internal-hard-drive-ssdsc2bp480g4r5

 

[Cerb]

Plus I'm wondering how SSDs handle when they are having alot of things written and read at the same time from different VMs. I don't know if that brings certain ones to their knees or what not.

Varies by SSD, but you don't have to break the bank. The old M500 and M550 excelled at that, while not being the best in low QD. The new MX200 should fair similarly. The Samsung 850 Evo I haven't seen tested like that, but the 840s didn't do it so well. The Iometer DB and workstation profiles are alright approximations, though.

http://techreport.com/review/27824/crucial-bx100-and-mx200-solid-state-drives-reviewed/5
Looks pretty good for the new Microns. You can click below the chart to change what they are compared against. You can clearly see even the Samsung 850 Pro is only a little bit faster.