samsung 840 EVO and windows 2008 R2

[pr0n$tar]

I am wondering how i will be able to successfully accomplish this. Im a fairly certain that windows 2008 R2 wont have this driver in its default driver store. I say this because windows 2008r2 is 5. 5 years old. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Btw, not that it matters im running a MSI motherboard H81m-p33. I wanted to use my PATa drive but this motherboard has no IDE legacy ports. I dont think using a sata to ide or usb to sata converter helps me. I dont want to use converters. Especially when setting up boot drives.

 

[Berryracer]

First, what driver are you talking about? I`ve never heard of a driver for any SSD

Secondly, I wouldn't recommend the EVO in a server machine due its TLC NAND and very inconsistent performance results.

Go for the 840 PRO series which is the king of sustained performance

I sold my two 1TB 840 EVOs and changed them for 512GB 840 PROs instead much better performance and much more reliable

 

[BonzaiDuck]

First, what driver are you talking about? I`ve never heard of a driver for any SSD

Secondly, I wouldn't recommend the EVO in a server machine due its TLC NAND and very inconsistent performance results.

Go for the 840 PRO series which is the king of sustained performance

I sold my two 1TB 840 EVOs and changed them for 512GB 840 PROs instead much better performance and much more reliable

I think that all depends on HOW it would be used in a server.

I see no reason why one shouldn't use a small SSD for the boot-system disk of a server OS. In the OP's case, his mobo features sata-III ports, so he'd get the full performance out of the SSD for accessing it remotely or at the console.

As for drivers, I used an 840 EVO 120GB unit for my WHS-2011 OS -- which is a scaled down version of Win 2008 R2 . There is no "special driver:" it uses the MSAHCI native driver of the OS.

Except for a swapfile and volume shadow copies -- which can be put anywhere or even on a separate partition/volume of the same SSD -- there are not going to be a lot of writes to a server OS disk.

In my case, the EVO is hooked up to a controller on a PCIe 1.0 slot and provides only about 70% of the throughput of the same disk on a contemporary motherboard SATA-III. I can't see how it is any further limited by remote access through my gigabit network. It's still about triple what I'd get with an HDD on the same controller port.

If anyone thinks I've strayed on the wrong path from what makes sense -- post it here. I'd be interested.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Nah, I'm with you Bonzai. I've seen servers booting from SD cards, cheap SATA drives, whatever works. Windows isn't as nice about it as, say, ESX, but in general, you can boot from anything if the data you're accessing is on a solid set of disks somewhere else. You just aren't hitting the boot disk that much.

That said, yeah, I wouldn't want to use a consumer SSD as a primary datastore.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Nah, I'm with you Bonzai. I've seen servers booting from SD cards, cheap SATA drives, whatever works. Windows isn't as nice about it as, say, ESX, but in general, you can boot from anything if the data you're accessing is on a solid set of disks somewhere else. You just aren't hitting the boot disk that much.

That said, yeah, I wouldn't want to use a consumer SSD as a primary datastore.

Just the thought of use in "primary datastore" makes me uneasy about SSDs. In my case, it seemed that accessing the Dashboard either locally or from a client was a tad slow, and the SSD gave some improvement to that. But an equal reason was power consumption, even if a small increment: the server runs 24/7, and it's a balance between capacity, redundancy and . . . "too many drives." So I put the OS, the shadow copies, the swap file and the scheduled OS-disk backup on SSDs.

JUST AN [EDIT] AFTERTHOUGHT: Magician WILL install and run under Win 2008 R2 (per my WHS experience). It will also tell you that RAPID mode cannot be implemented for a server OS. But the rest of it is good.

 

[pr0n$tar]

@ berryracer i thought there would an issue of loading an OS on a hdd for fresh install because i have been reading ms technet articles and some scsi host adapter wont have drivers available so you needed to press f6 during setup to introduce your own driver. I am studying for mcitp 70-643 and need to setup a few computers to network load balance RDS connections. I want to use multiple vms and make a multiple rds client connecttion to vms within host OS. I plan on setting up sharepoint foundation as well. I have another pc to setup to srtipu lab.

I was going to just use windows2go and boot off my usb stick as a hdd. But i dont like complication.. I dont know how to do it in windows 2k8 R2.

Plus i bought the samsung ev0 drive already! Im not returning it. I heard good things about it. I heard bad things about other brands and didnt want to take chance

I may reuse this to setup a webserver for my personal business. I used to have a hoster do it but since ive been practicing application infrastructure i know how to do it now.

@bonzaiduck if you say that whs wont allow RAPID mode for server OS ! Whars that? I want to conserve power too once i run a home server

 

[BonzaiDuck]

@ berryracer i thought there would an issue of loading an OS on a hdd for fresh install because i have been reading ms technet articles and some scsi host adapter wont have drivers available so you needed to press f6 during setup to introduce your own driver. I am studying for mcitp 70-643 and need to setup a few computers to network load balance RDS connections. I want to use multiple vms and make a multiple rds client connecttion to vms within host OS. I plan on setting up sharepoint foundation as well. I have another pc to setup to srtipu lab.

I was going to just use windows2go and boot off my usb stick as a hdd. But i dont like complication.. I dont know how to do it in windows 2k8 R2.

Plus i bought the samsung ev0 drive already! Im not returning it. I heard good things about it. I heard bad things about other brands and didnt want to take chance

I may reuse this to setup a webserver for my personal business. I used to have a hoster do it but since ive been practicing application infrastructure i know how to do it now.

@bonzaiduck if you say that whs wont allow RAPID mode for server OS ! Whars that? I want to conserve power too once i run a home server

RAPID mode for Samsung Pro and EVO 840's and later uses system RAM to cache the SSD, so that you can get (either Samsung, Atto, CrystalDiskMark, etc.) bench results that can be 12x the standalone spec sequential read and write rates of the SSD. But that's because of the proprietary software.

You can get a version of Romex Software's Primo-Cache that will cache all your drives -- SSDs and HDDs -- in a server-version that probably costs more than the PC desktop Win7/8 version, but is still reasonable considering their potential markets, their strategy and customer-base.

If you are especially using Win Svr 2008 R2 at home with a family-full of PCs and accounts, the $120 server software would be a luxury of small matter considering the bandwidth of wired and wireless consumer LAN equipment. You might not ever miss it. You'd probably be better with caching software on your workstations at $30 each or a multi-PC license.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/purchase.html