HDDs prices

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Having it in my mind is a good way to reject warranty claims, all they have to do is pull the smart data from the drive and compare the power on hours and how much has been written to it.

Well yeah, because some of us actually do put unreasonable workloads on things. Back in 2015 when cheap consumer SSD pricing had just barely touched $159 for a 480GB Intel 535 SSD, I bought a bunch of them for datacenter use on the theory that at 40GB/day (73TBW) endurance, our needs were such that we'd blow through the endurance in about 2-4 years, and I was expecting better/bigger/cheaper SSD's to be available at that time. Since I do virtually all hypervisor datastores as RAID1, usually with hot spare, this is a pragmatic strategy to exploit the benefits of inexpensive SSD.

The endurance planning was largely on the nose and we've had a bunch of them fail. Many of them failed with total loss of SSD controller sanity, rendering the SMART stats inaccessible. I've just been RMA'ing them to Intel and getting replacements. We also had a few "fizzle" in some way that convinced the RAID controller they were dead but did not actually seem to have failed.

Unfortunately, the price curve did not follow what we were hoping for, and the prices for SSD shot way up for awhile, and only recently have become better. My current favorite SSD's for general VM datastores are the WD Blue, the 860 Evo, and the MX500. All of them are relatively inexpensive, high quality, and great endurance.

To bring this around to the mid-thread topic, I have favored sticking three WD Red 2.5 1TB drives in hypervisors for ESXi boot and low-IOPS VM's for years now (RAID1 + spare). They're around $60-$70/each and once you wdidle them they seem to be problem-free. But the pricing on the WD Blue 1TB SSD's have finally fallen into the ~2x cost (~$110), so I've started moving to those. Seems very pleasant. I'm hoping that they end up as a suitable replacement for the WD Red's. Because we were keeping writes to the Reds on the low side to appease the limited IOPS available, I think it'll be fine.

And that brings us back to the OP's issue... people switching from HDD to SSD will continue to pose a pricing challenge for the HDD mfrs.
 
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