SSDs vs. NAS HDDs considering July 2023 SSD Prices

[mry]

Hi everyone! Thanks for all the contributions by others, helpful reading thus far.

I'd like to build a simple NAS for home use (Plex server, PC Backups, miscellaneous overflow storage). I may repurpose an old Xeon workstation from ebay along with 16GB+ of ECC RAM, or perhaps I might buy a server motherboard and build a server from scratch. Right now the NAS would be connected via 1 Gb/s ethernet, but down the line I might entertain upgrading my home networking. Would like the Xeon to be Skylake or newer to include Quick Sync transcoding for the Plex side of things. All in all, a pretty basic home NAS. I am considering a 3-drive RAIDz approach that would provide about 4 TB of storage.

It's crazy how SSD prices have dropped, to where they now are at cost parity per GB with HDDs (or even cheaper!). With that in mind, would SSDs be better for the server I'm discussing than HDDs? I'm reviewing storage pricing, and with how SSD prices are plummeting, some of the old assumptions and rules of thumb around storage seem to be changing (get SSDs for speed and no moving parts, but get HDDs for low $/GB). But look at these two drives:

TeamGroup Vulcan Z 2TB ($60.99 as of 7/25/23):https://pcpartpicker.com/mr/newegg/Fqt9TW

WD Red Plus 2TB ($72.99 as of 7/25/23): https://a.co/d/h63njfh

Over a gigabit network, I won't realize the added speed that SSDs offer. But these two drives have the same MTBF, and the SSD has 1,600 TBW endurance with its 3D NAND. Obviously this conversation would be different with say a QLC SSD or something with much lower endurance. But anyway, I'm not going to be hammering these drives with writes - it seems like SSDs might be the more reliable, more performant, and cheaper option?

As a side note, another interesting comparison is the WD Red SATA SSDs that are optimized for NAS use. This 2TB drive (https://a.co/d/hFAfqm1) is $149.99 as of 7/25/23, but compared to the TeamGroup drive, it has a lower TBW rating of 1,300. It seems the TeamGroup drive is more durable than the "NAS" optimized SSD, but are there other factors I'm not considering with the WD Red SSD?

Which would be a better approach, a 3-drive RAIDz approach with those WD Red Plus 2TB drives, or a 3-drive RAIDz approach with the TeamGroup drives?

 

[Morris]

Unless you are rewriting the drives all the time the endurance will not matter. One of each might be best so they don't ware out at the same time yet they should be the same size to make configuring simple. Consider two mirrored strips rather than RAID z1, saves CPU and the reads are blazing fast. Using an old Xeon board will likely use a lot of power. Do you want to pay for that and how much CPU do you need? Consider a low end video card for encoding.

 

[NickF]

Love this conversation.
If you are doing what a lot of folks are doing and just dumping some movie files and personal documents and pictures, and later just reading those files back throughout the day? If that's you, buy some QLC NAND instead of spinning rust. I kid. I kid. It's not that easy yet.

In fairness to hard drives, a brand new 2TB hard drive in 2023 only exists to service niche legacy enterprise systems, with some trickle down into retail. According to my good friend, Mr Edward Betts, https://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
The going rate for best price per TB is about $15.00 right now for hard drives, which is interesting given the mix of sizes, SKUs and that follow up to about $18.

My same dear friend reports on pricing for SSDs as well, so we can compare apples-to-apples for how pricing was sourced.
The going rate for a good deal on SATA SSDs? $30 a TB. NVME? $32 a TB.

So based on pricing and relative performance to size ratio, we can pretty much conclude that SATA SSDs for this market are basically a waste of money relative to NVME pricing. Obviously platform restrictions apply, good reasons exist, caveat exemptor.

But we can also conclude that HDD is still king in price/TB. It's up to you if relative performance is a factor, price/TB/insert_relative_permormance_rating ?

In other words, the price per TB is approximately 2x right now, which is actually very good if we consider how much faster NVME is. It's not that long ago that "Ryan's Law" of $0.10/GB was the standard to be judged.

$65 / 2048 GB = $0.03173828125/GB

So the cost per GB is less than $0.10/GB, which means we have indeed met Ryan's Law according to current NVME pricing. Thanks PCPer.

 

[mry]

Unless you are rewriting the drives all the time the endurance will not matter. One of each might be best so they don't ware out at the same time yet they should be the same size to make configuring simple. Consider two mirrored strips rather than RAID z1, saves CPU and the reads are blazing fast. Using an old Xeon board will likely use a lot of power. Do you want to pay for that and how much CPU do you need? Consider a low end video card for encoding.

I like the idea of two mirrored strips, thanks.

I don't necessarily want to use a Xeon platform, would like something with lower power, but every hardware thread I read on this forum includes hand-wringing about using non-ECC RAM, so the Xeon route would allow me to include ECC RAM. But I have an old Celeron Chromebox that I'd like to repurpose, it would be a lot lower power, but no ECC RAM. I wonder if it's worth a try.

Yeah, there are a bunch of low-cost old Quadro cards on Ebay that have strong transcoding capabilities, that would be a solid option for sure

Thanks man

 

[mry]

Love this conversation.
If you are doing what a lot of folks are doing and just dumping some movie files and personal documents and pictures, and later just reading those files back throughout the day? If that's you, buy some QLC NAND instead of spinning rust. I kid. I kid. It's not that easy yet.

In fairness to hard drives, a brand new 2TB hard drive in 2023 only exists to service niche legacy enterprise systems, with some trickle down into retail. According to my good friend, Mr Edward Betts, https://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
The going rate for best price per TB is about $15.00 right now for hard drives, which is interesting given the mix of sizes, SKUs and that follow up to about $18.

My same dear friend reports on pricing for SSDs as well, so we can compare apples-to-apples for how pricing was sourced.
The going rate for a good deal on SATA SSDs? $30 a TB. NVME? $32 a TB.

So based on pricing and relative performance to size ratio, we can pretty much conclude that SATA SSDs for this market are basically a waste of money relative to NVME pricing. Obviously platform restrictions apply, good reasons exist, caveat exemptor.

But we can also conclude that HDD is still king in price/TB. It's up to you if relative performance is a factor, price/TB/insert_relative_permormance_rating ?

In other words, the price per TB is approximately 2x right now, which is actually very good if we consider how much faster NVME is. It's not that long ago that "Ryan's Law" of $0.10/GB was the standard to be judged.

$65 / 2048 GB = $0.03173828125/GB

So the cost per GB is less than $0.10/GB, which means we have indeed met Ryan's Law according to current NVME pricing. Thanks PCPer.

Definitely when you get in the higher storage tiers, HDDs still have that density and $/TB advantage. For instance 8TB SATA SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs, the cost per TB gets really low in those high-density drives. But still overall cost can get out of hand if you buy 8-22TB drives with the lowest $/TB when 4TB of storage is more than enough.

I guess my original comparison is a little flawed because I limited the comparison to "NAS" rated HDDs and SATA SSDs - the price for the NAS HDDs is a little inflated compared to entry-level HDDs. Are "NAS" rated drives all that important?

NVME is awesome - performance, form factor, $/TB, but the main limitation is compatibility. Modern hardware is highly compatible, but you go back to something a little older and then you're looking at M.2 add-in cards and controllers that add their own cost. SATA seems to retain the compatibility crown.

Thanks a ton for sharing Edward Betts' price reports, very informative indeed . We're all spoiled right now - I remember skrimping and saving to include a 64GB SATA SSD as a boot drive for a PC build I was doing, and it cost more than the bulk storage it seems. So nice to have so many options for cheap, high performance, reliable solid-state storage.