SSD/pci-e ssd and spinning sata

[TeleFragger]

Ok so I have a server as posted in another thread...

I have
2x wd black sata drives
2x ssd drives
and I just got a pci-e quad ssd m.2 card with 2x512 m.2's
**** PM951
**** PM961


so would this work as datastores? wondering if it is nice and fast as I can take my sata drives out removing spinning drives....

what would you do?

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

In general, yes. But you don't offer much detail as to what you're planning.

A datastore for what? Local to a VM host (e.g., ESXi, Proxmox)? Sitting in a FreeNAS or similar and served out via iSCSI/NFS/etc.?

 

[TeleFragger]

Ya know i was thinking of that... sometimes i swear my ocd kicks in and i think you know what im thinking lol..

Ok so esxi 6.7 local storage datastore to replace 3 spinning disks.

I guess i need to see if this will be picked up and usable and then if it performs better than spinning drives.

Guess i was reaching out to see if anyone has tried one of these devices

 

[Eickst]

Yes you can use it as a datastore. Any disk the esxi OS can pick up and format can be used as a datastore.

Yes it will perform better than the spinning disks. At least in disk IO. Hard to say if that will help whatever services you're running in those VMs

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

Yep, no problem as far as ESXi is concerned. It has had proper support for SSDs for quite a while now. Guest performance should benefit greatly, same as running a SSD in your desktop. Drawbacks are of course the same as what you'd have with a local HDD store (e.g., no RAID/mirroring support, transferring images between hosts kinda sucks, etc.).

Only possible gotcha I see is the m.2 expander card. Are you certain it's compatible with your mainboard? Most such boards are simple, without an integrated PCIe switch, and rely on the mainboard BIOS/UEFI to enable/config PCIe bifurcation and support multiple devices is a single slot.