Project TinyMiniMicro Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro Review
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- Main site article with more detail here: www.servetheho...
Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro the homelab revolution: www.servetheho...
In this a STH Project TinyMiniMicro installment, we review the Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro. This server is small with just over 1L of displacement. It sips power, is relatively quiet, and has fairly solid performance either as a workstation (its intended use case) or as low power and low-cost servers (Project TinyMiniMicro.) We go into some of the nice quality details. The best part? We got this unit directly from Dell for $333 and it has a 3-year on-site warranty.
Project TinyMiniMicro on the STH forums for more detail as well: forums.serveth...
Other STH References for this piece
- Of BBQ and Virtualization (Video): • Of Virtualization and BBQ
- Of BBQ and Virtualization (Article): www.servetheho...
Just adding since this seems to be a common bit. We purchased this unit a few weeks ago. Total price was $333.68 (I probably should have said $334.) Screenshot twitter.com/Patrick1Kennedy/status/1289215632844578816 --- We watched prices and for deals for a few weeks before buying. Also, the Dell Outlet can have good deals but ones like this will get purchased quickly.
@@miodragradosavljevic8517 Why don't you post it in a support page?
Good news: here are some cheery tones and flashing LEDs.
Bad news: your hard drive's dead.
I had mine (the i5-9500T variant) since June, and I love it. I upgraded mine with 32GB RAM and a 2TB SSD, and it runs great. I do my computer science work on it (HTML, PostgreSQL, ERD modeling, networking stuff, Visual Studio starting the following semester, etc.). I also run VMs like Linux Mint and SEED in VMware, as well as create music. I even use it as a RDP server for my iPad. I'd definitely recommend it.
How's the fan noise?
@@MBisFrenchy Barely noticeable.
Can you send the links for the ssd and the ram?
May i please know which ram and ssd you used please
Going from DP out to HDMI in is easy, you can use a cheap passive adapter. Doing the reverse, from HDMI out to DP in requires an active adapter with supplemental USB power. That said, most monitors have at least one HDMI port now.
As for the hard drive, if you buy say, 16 of these machines, you could get one of those IcyDock 16 bay 2.5 inch to 2x5.25 adapters and a SAS controller(requires 4x SFF SAS connectors) giving you a compact 8TB(raw) storage solution, just provide the drive cage/adapter, SAS controller, and computer
I have one of these filled with 2TB drives that were on sale for like $60, For $1300, i got 32TB of raw storage (ZFS Z3 reduces that quite a bit) with reletively high throughput compared to 3.5 drives, and i was able to put it in a compact miniITX build that i can cary in one hand.
thanks for another great video. I'd just like to point out that there are a lot of markets outside of US and other high income countries, where HDDs are still sold and bought and actively used. For a lot of uses that 500GB SATA plug of a device will be more than enough to just get things going, and upgrading to an SSD would not be financially efficient
Great point and excellent context
When I heard the jingle and close my eyes I remembered my Tamagotchi-I kindof want to play my Tamagotchi again.
I bought a Dell OptiPLex 3040M used for our job number board at our office to replace the Raspberry Pi we had used. (MicroSD storage kept corrupting...) - I think it's even worth noting that these Dell units have these nice mounting kits you can buy and mount them under a desk, on a wall, or just about anywhere that doesn't occupy desk space, really.
Since we use a TV for the screen, the HDMI port was more than perfect. I seriously am considering replacing our older Dell Core2Duo machines with these OptiPLex Micros as well.
Great point on the mounting options.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo There's a VESA kit as well so the micro will slot into a box on the back of a monitor bolted to the VESA screw holes.
Enjoying this series on small low-power PCs and all the minutiae to watch out for
I use 3060 micro's in my lab, that are awesome, and the power consumption makes me really happy as well as the sound
I think we have an OptiPlex 3050 Micro but not the 3060 Micro yet (we do have the 7060 Micro tested though)
@@ServeTheHomeVideo those are also great units. Mine comes from I think an "old" stock, maybe replacements in an office. I purchased it as used but those are absolutely clean and came with an M.2 SSD. According to the SSD's on time those machines newer used. For, I think 65.000 HUF (Around 220USD)
I have an older generation 3070 and have one Samsung 960 Pro 1TB m.2 and 850 Pro 2.5inch 512GB for Plex and some other services. Runs great. Only sometimes the m.2 get a bit hot around 50c but still heatly range for that drive.
if the "hey your hard drive is dead" is that little jingle, then what would play when the motherboard is dead? funeral march? XD
Good one!
The jingle would be the ultimate nightmare for sysadmins
Great review. Many thanks from Nova Scotia..
I can't seem to get more than 1700MBps out of this thing. It appears that the NVMe slot is only operating at PCIe 2.0 instead of the advertised 3.0 so my NVMe drive is basically operating at half-speed. Any thoughts or confirmation?
I like that Dell is pretty consistent with their naming for their Optiplex line. It helps when shopping for these on the used market. Lenovo and HP's are a bit of a naming mess. Now if only it was as easy to find the Optiplex minis as it is to find the SFF and USFF systems...
Most used corporate desktops are coming from lease returns. Dell has their own internal leasing department and they are less likely to offer fair market leases than the competitors using traditional financing companies. So fewer Dell machines enter the resale markets for this reason. Most that do are being returned to dell. So lookup the dell refurbished website for those deals.
Should add dell usually has lease deals on the $1 buyout full value leases so companies tend to keep the machines at the end and often a financial or medical company ends up destroying old machines to prevent data leakage so those end up as scrap metal not refurbs.
@@UpcraftConsulting I was wondering how that worked. I can find the SFF and USFF Optiplexes all day long (typically 390/790/990, 3010/7010/9010, and 3020/7020/9020). Anything after that is pretty hard to find (though arguably they are still within their life cycle).
Thanks for the tip on the Dell refurb site.
In case it's not obvious, I'm not an IT professional... So I really do appreciate you sharing your wisdom here.
Set up and alert on Mercari. They’re posted all the time.
Excellent reviews. These seem like the winners!
Picked up a Lenovo Thinkcentre M93p Tiny off eBay for $220. i7-4770T, 8 GB single SODIMM, and a 240 GB WD Green.
Works fine as a semi-hidden LAN Minecraft server.
We are not going back to the M930p generation (trying to stay 6th gen and newer on the Intel side to manage scope) but that is exactly the idea.
Love how much progress the content has made! Feedback: not sure all users will be able to tell, but there seems to be a slight biassing of your sound towards the highs and then sound is a bit thin; ends up sounding a little bit like spitting glass and harsh!
Ordered stuff for another audio re-do yesterday. This is a project for a few weeks.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Happy to (excuse the pun) hear that! The content you're putting out is top notch, can't wait to see more! I may have missed it, but with the tinyminimicro series, any chance we could see multiple of them used in a proxmox and/or kubernetes set up?
Back with the 3020 Micro that had a spinning disk one of our company's divisions had bough a lot and had a lot of drive failures due to heat generated by the drive/system. The 3020/7020/9020 series were haswell based and also their first transition to this form-factor. So that may be why there was a heat issue. With the 30x0 series Dells you always get fewer USB 3 ports and the higher end 70x0 systems come with at least one USB C port, starting with the 7050 and I believe all the Type A ports are USB 3 capable. And all the 30x0 series systems I've seen have Realtek NICs where as the 70x0 systems always have Intel NICs. Dell does make a Latitude charge cable to micro charge cable adapter and we buy them since we have a lot more Latitude spare PSUs than Micros. That is Dell part # 57J49. Very useful to have around since some of the Micros need a 90w or 130w brick and they sometimes get misplaced and someone will try to use a 65w brick on them which will throw an error at boot and the system may refuse to run. Just keep the old Latitude cords around and adapt them to save money on spares.
Really useful video, thank you. I have a used one on the way and I wanted to learn what you thought of it. 😊
Ahh I'm fond of that Dell beep and jingle
That chime brings me back to working on old Dell Precision laptops. When running onboard diagnostics and encountering an error you get that pleasant chime, warning you your keyboard or touchpad connector died or your graphics card VRAM died or you failed to remind Dell that legacy boot is ancient and you should enable UEFI.
Its a shame that Apples Mini is not so good with access to the internals :)
And that it costs 300% more
Here in 2024, I'm contemplating one of these, with the i5-9500T, as a general office machine, with Windows 11, 365, Teams, Zoom etc. Is that still a good idea?
11:50
For anybody who wants to know about POWER CONSUMPTION = 10 to 40 watt range for these micro computers.
Waiting to see AMD 4000 series APUs(hoping the 8 core APUs will fall into the same price point as the quad core of last gen). Lenovo, and IIRC dell have a nice tool for getting those error tones figured out
I would go for the HP EliteDesk mini 800 G2 is a 6th gen intel i5 4 core 4 threads and it costs $260 dollars with 16gb ram. $300+ is just too much I think
We have the G2 with an i5-6500T as well. I think there is a lot of merit to those. We nabbed one with an i5-6500T and 8GB of RAM for $160 without a disk. It will be part of the series.
I found the i5 version of this for 100$
When the only 3070 u will ever have is an optiplex
I think I will wait for at least the 5 next épisodes of this series before using my desktop pc as a server. 6w at idle sounds pretty sweet to my ears even though it doesn't have space for my 5 HDDs and undetermined amount of SSDs (it's a nas+multimedia+messingAround build)
Your review says you got this from Dell at $333, but they start at $530 on their website :/
When are they putting out their Ryzen 4000G Renoir workstations?
Check out the pinned comment on the pricing bit. On the Ryzen 4000G, my guess is that Lenovo or HP will do it first.
I love Dell
As always awesome Review but still no machine with ecc support :(
Not looking promising in this range. Then again, even if it did it is only ECC UDIMM support, not RDIMM support.
Great review Patrick! I’m thinking about the Beelink GT-R Ryzen5 with dual gig NIC 35w TDP for my next pfsense build, can this make it in your series and do you think it be an easy deployment for pfsense build? Regards Shane from Trinidad 🇹🇹
I tend to be very conservative with pfSense builds and always try to go completely passive with Intel i350 or (if not possible) i210 NICs in the 1GbE segment.
There isn't any option'ed computer on dell's website that is listed for $333.
Had to wait for coupons to get the deal a few weeks ago. Also, if you want to find them easier, you can also check out the Outlet which sometimes has these (but they get picked up quickly)
Came to the comments precisely for this... nowhere near $333; this config is 549 after 40% off at Dell!
@@rickhendricks6458 Yea - coupons/ deals change over time. Ordered a few weeks ago and there is a lag for ship time, testing, filming, editing, publishing, and so forth. twitter.com/Patrick1Kennedy/status/1289215632844578816
Is the Dell OptiPlex 3070 CORE i5 strong enough to run Adobe Premiere Pro on? Great video, thanks!
Which one would you choose if the only use you had for it would be running the Synology Surveillance Station Client program to keep a live view of 4 IP cams displayed?
Is it compatible with non T processor?
Usually you want the 65W CPU versions of these 1L PCs for non-T. They have better cooling and bigger PSUs to handle the load.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo mine is a 35w at version.. and im using 160watt fsp power brick ... is it ok to upgrade a non T processor ?
Interesting unit. Would be cool to see something with Nvidia GPU in this mini category (for ML inference). I’m playing with Jetson AGX Xavier which is impressive but unfortunately arm architecture, so not as friendly as x86_64. Curious if you can suggest some edge gpu server.
We have both the Lenovo P320 and P330 with low-end GPUs onboard. Getting to NVIDIA T4 levels is tough just due to power and space constraints.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks for reply! I've seen Intel NUCs being able to fit custom GPU cards like 2070. In my case it doesn't have to be tiny but it's good to have small factor. Cheers.
hdd is useful to install unraid as the array does not support trim.
How's the power consumption? Is it energy saving compared to some Dell laptops?
I know it's been a bit, but di you run into issues with DP to HDMI not recognizing monitor? DP to DP works fine as well as HDMI to DP., but EP to HDMI appears no good.
That's not a dead hard drive jingle, it's the general error jingle for Dell ePSA.
Totally true. Seemed like more fun to call it the "your hard drive died jingle" since that is how we encountered it :-)
Thanks for reviewing many of the low power mini PCs. Is there any mini PC with short slots for SAS card so we can use it for NAS server with external SASA HD arrays ?
There are a number of challenges with that. Some of the Lenovo M920 or M9xx series systems can have a PCIe slot via a riser. You can likely make something work, but it would be easier/ less expensive to step up to a slightly larger SFF system.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo thanks for the prompt response. But I have yet to find a new/used SFF with T-type low power CPU, which seems one of the key features for a low power consumption NAS for home use.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I have not seen any SFF system with low power T-type CPU.
@@jinlsui Could you find an SFF barebones with a compatible chipset and a T-Series chip separately?
@@steveheist6426 not yet. I may have to wait for TB port available on mini pc.
A couple of questions:
1) I noticed the removable heatsink on the Dell unit. Does that mean the CPU is removable?
2) Have you come across any small units that have one PCI expansion slot?
Yes. We have a bit more on that on the linked STH main site article, but it is an LGA1151 socket. You are limited in terms of low power CPUs though since you cannot put something like an i9-9900K in this and power/ cool it. You could buy one of these and swap i3 to a i5-9500T or Pentium
Sorry double reply. On the PCIe, the Lenovo P320/P330 Tiny are good examples since they have low-power NVIDIA GPUs onboard. Likely the P320 will be the next we review.
Is using the nvme slot for optane memory and having a 500 GB drive a good idea?
Jose - I am generally a fan of just using SSDs, but in some locations the HDD+Optane Memory is a lower cost option.
i have a 3070 micro same as the one u are showcasing, i am thinking of upgrading the wifi card to a wifi 6 card, what m.2 card would u recommend? so far from the digging I've done seems like best m.2 card is intel ax200, the version without vPro, is this correct or is there a better card?
Great review.
Stupid part on the part of Dell.ca.
The 3070 Micro with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD WITHOUT the wireless card is $829 CAD.
WITH the Qualcomm wireless card, that price (still with the same process, 8 GB of RAM, and same 256 GB of NVMe SSD) jumps to $1401.61.
There is NO way that that Qualcomm wireless card is worth $572.61 CAD.
Dell -- WHATTTT ARE YOU DOING???
I WAS going to recommend this system over an Apple Mac Mini (because Apple Mac Minis have gone up to $999 CAD now for the base model), but there is NO WAY that I justify a $572.61 price increase for a M.2 Qualcomm wireless card.
No way!
This is sheer utter stupidity on the part of Dell's marketing team.
Would it be possible to install an SSD Samsung 980 Pro WITH HEATSINK (considering the Heatsink's width) in the m.2 nvme Slot of this Dell OptiPlex 3070?
Would it fit also to be installed along a regular size SATA SSD? (both at the same time)
Is fan noisy? I would like to use it as home server. If fan noise is hearable i will buy msi cubi 5 instead
I own this model and I want to add a new display port to have 2 display ports but I can't find anything on dell website ( card name, product code..or anything) Can somebody help me ?
Q? If you open the chassis of it pc. Could you please inform-is CPU is soldered to the system board or its a socket? To know is there possibility in the future to upgrade cpu. At least in the range of one generation,e.g. change i3 8gen by i5 or i7 8gen?
What's the use case ? I used them for enterprise and not happy with the stupid external power supply. Really easy to loose. I'm talking manufacturing facility.
Usually embedded systems have locking PSUs. More as homelab gear for the focus of this series.
The cheapest config I see right now for 3070 Micro is $529. The mentioned $333 price is nowhere to find.
Looks like the deal we got is not active right now. Check coupons + outlet. It was $333.68 not $333. twitter.com/Patrick1Kennedy/status/1289215632844578816
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thank you, good to know.
How can I use the built in mic on my headset?
The beeps are nothing new to Dell when something goes wrong or breaks
Hy, do you have any video on how to add extra vga / DP with M2 card
Is there any solutions for to admin IPMI for this unit?
The closest in this segment is the vPro we mention. You would want a 5070 or 7070 version (that also supports it) for that. Not IPMI but some similar features
Have you'd checked out Qotom mini PCs? I use one as a router, but they would be good for this project, too.
I have one actually. I like the idea for multiple Intel NICs. They are a different segment, but I get the point.
I've put 16 GB of memory and a 500GB SSD in mine, and the 7100U sips power, so they can make decent compact and silent lab machines.
I just got my Micro Optiplex 3070 last week, and have run into an issue with the Wifi connection dropping with no apparent reason. Resetting the pc will fix it, but this is not acceptable. I ran the Support Assist diagnostics on the Qualcomm QCA61x4A wifi adapter card and does not report any issues. I also checked for latest driver installed. Is anyone else having the same issue?
No, not one person
sir what gpu can be installed on that cpu?
Does this support esxi 7.0? And 64 gb ram
What would you do with a Toshiba 500 GB 2.5" HDD?
Install your OS on it and never have to worry about the swap killing your SSD by burning through the write endurance limit of said SSDs.
I have a system right now that has 64 GB of RAM and an Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD that I am using for the swap drive, and in the year since my original Intel 750 Series wore through the write endurance, I am now at around 73% of life left on the new SSDs that was sent to me, from Intel, after having previously RMA'd the prior one.
At this rate, I will also wear through this SSD about 3 years from now (total life of about 4 years out of a 5 year warranty), and ALL it is doing is merely serving as the drive that hosts the swap file.
This IS what happens with SSDs.
They are, again, by design, designed to fail.
The NAND flash memory modules on them have a finite number of program/erase cycles to them and merely and simply using it as a swap drive is sufficient to kill one within the warranty period.
THIS is what you do with a Toshiba 500 GB 2.5" HDD.
I would take the Toshiba over a SSD ANYDAY now because I have already had to RMA SIX Intel SSDs back to Intel over the past four years, where unlike the SSDs, the failure rate of the Toshiba HDD is significantly less than 100% (Backblaze put Toshiba drive failure rates at around 1% (Source: www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/)).
Therefore; to recap:
SSDs: 100% failure rate. (It isn't a question of if, but a question of when, because you WILL consume the finite number of erase/program cycles of those NAND flash memory cells/modules).
HDDs: (for Toshiba) ~1%.
I'll take the ~1% failure rate, thank you.
(If it weren't for the fact that I've had to RAM SIX Intel SSDs over the last 4 years, I wouldn't be writing this. And the most recent failure as a NAND flash memory module/cell READ error, it wasn't even a write error. When I asked Intel if they had tools to try and bypass the NAND flash memory module READ error so that I can extract the data (because it was my OS/boot drive), they said, and I quote:
"Regarding your inquiries, Intel is not liable for data loss in connection with the product, regardless of the cause; for this reason we recommend maintaining a back up of all data on the product at all times."
Which means that unless you're going to have a SSD paired in mirrored/RAID1 configuration, your OS drive can and WILL fail on you at SOME point in the future.
Furthermore, Intel's own Intel SSD Toolbox can report the SMART status back to you, but DOES NOT tell you when a drive is about to fail, e.g. flash up a warning that your SSD, say, only has about 10% of it's life left or something, so that YOU know to start doing what you need to do in order to start securing your data and your OS/boot drive.
Intel's SSD Toolbox will PROBE the SMART status, but it doesn't PROACTIVELY warn you about the imminent failure of its own products. So unless YOU are constantly and actively checking on the SMART status, (which let's be real here - NOBODY does), you will NEVER know that your drive is about to fail and the ONLY time you will know that is when it has ALREADY failed.
I have been using SSDs for 12 years now. I have probably bought 40 of them. Maybe more. I have yet to have one die on me. In that period I’ve had a 5 HDDs die. This is nonsense.
@@edurm6766
"This is nonsense."
No. What this tells me is that your drive usage pattern is more reads than writes, AND that if it is a part of the drive that has the swap file, your system doesn't have that much RAM where it is swapping data in an out of and/or you're not running Windows.
And if you are more read heavy than write heavy, you can really benefit from it, but then again, you are also only really using about HALF of the performance potential of the drives.
Also depends on what kind of drives you're buying.
Run the SMART analysis on your drives and figure out how much of the drive's write endurance you have left and then based on the average daily volume of data written to your SSDs, you can estimate when it will exhaust the write endurance and fail.
Also keep in mind that earlier SSDs were manufactured using SLC cells, and therefore; it actually has quite a substantially higher write endurance because of that, but also comes at either lower capacities and/or higher cost per capacity at the time when you purchased them (vs. the MLC drives that you're able to buy now).
Ewen Chan You’re probably right. Right now I’m using a 500GB TLC SSD that writes about 75GB per day from 3 security cameras until the data is finally archived for storage on spinning disks at the end of the day. I have had this set up going for about 3 years now. I have replaced one HDD since. Otherwise, most of my SSDs don’t get excessive writes like that drive does. In my situation they’re a lot more reliable than spinning disks have been. Most of the SSDs I buy now are QLC or TLC. Even newer EVO Samsung drives are using QLC Nand. Maybe the issue is the Intel drive you’re using.
Ewen Chan I used a couple of different utilities to check the writes, and estimated life left of my drives. I am well aware of these utilities and have upgraded firmware on drives over time. I’m more interested in SSDs providing better performance than having them last forever. Sorting through surveillance footage from that day is more responsive than reading from an HDD, especially when it is archived to the FreeNAS box. Oh, and every single SSD looked good. Roughly 75GB per day for 3 years now. TLC NAND, btw.
It seems like your issues should be pointed at Intel rather than SSDs as a whole. Samsung offers significantly better warranties than what you would see on something from a Toshiba HDD. The first 2TB HDD I ever bought was a Toshiba back in 2008 and it died 2 months after the warranty expired. I had them on the phone, and they wouldn’t do anything about it. I’m sure that specific Intel 750 PCI-E drive you’re speaking of has a very good warranty, which is why you have had 4 drives RMA’d, but there is no reason why you should write SSDs off as a whole. I can understand if you’re doing a ridiculous amount of writes per day for something that is enterprise. And as I said, I somewhat agree with you. I have a consumer 500GB Intel NVMe drive that absolutely chugs when it comes to writes. It gets hot and doesn’t have enough DRAM.
@@edurm6766
It depends on which make and model of HDD you're using as well as their operating environment/condition.
I pretty much exclusively use HGST drives and in like the last 17 years that I've used them, two has died, but that was because my computer was sitting in front of the heater vent, so it due to overheating as a result of said system sitting in front of the heater vent.
And I've bought somewhere between 80-100 HGST drives by now.
MLC drives are "cheaper" because MLC is cheaper. Over time, it isn't able to hold the four separate voltages as well, which is why some enterprise drives still only use SLC or DLC NAND flash memory modules, which also means for the same capacity, you need a LOT more SLC modules vs. MLC SSDs.
Conversely, their reliability and durability isn't as good compared to SLC drives, of course. So it's very much you get what you pay for, and if you have specific capacity requirements, that, of course, also factors into it as well.
I'm looking for something as small/cheap as these with pci expansion slots for NICs to run PFsense. Any ideas?
As small with slots won't happen the case is about the size of two Iphone X's side by side and about 4 iphones thick. But you can go to a Optiplex 3020/3040/3050 etc (or 70x0 90x0) in the small desktop form-factor and get a couple of low profile slots.
@@stonent Thanks!
hi... i watched a video on installing an nvme ssd with the necessary heat sink. ruclips.net/video/f8vdtiYxWI8/видео.html
... and it meant taking out the sata drive caddy. Did you do this too and does it restrict to 1 internal drive??
Would this setup be able to do some 1080p video editing?
You can always Velcro a SATA SSD elsewhere without the caddy if the heatsink gets in the way. On the 1080p video editing, TBH a M1 Mac Mini or a Lenovo P320/ P330 with a GPU would be a better option.
can this CPU be used for video editing ?
Core i3
9100 isn't that good for editing. It can do lighty stuff, but don't use that for your pro works
A mid-roll ad only a minute and a half in...? wtf.
Sorry. The RUclips places those.
I have the i5 version of this for sale on eBay...last one available... Great equipment
Your dismissive attitude regarding the 2.5-inch 500GB HDD speaks volumes.
Who pays full price for Windows 10 Pro? There are genuine offers for licences for around $20 and these are not the ones from dodgy resellers. Also there are lots of Dell SK-8135 and 8115 keyboards out there in job lots for next to nothing. Get one of these rather than some laptop refugee chiclet keyboard 😀🤷♂️
$4.90 for a new keyboard is pretty hard to argue. I am always a little apprehensive of used keyboards, but that is just me.
Where's a good place to get win 10 from? I think I need 2 more
Patrick,
Do NOT use SSDs.
They are, by design, designed to fail.
I've RMA's SIX Intel SSDs over the past four years, and one of them that was RMA'd last year (Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD) has already lost more than a quarter of its life, just as a swap drive.
DO NOT pull out the mechanically rotating hard drive.
YES, they are slower, but unlike SSDs, they are NOT designed to fail.
Once we started seeing Intel SSD failures trending at work we updated the firmware on all of them that were remaining and they were fairly solid after that. There is a recent trend in the Sk Hynix drives that have the orange corners doing this as well so we upgraded the firmware on them and the upgraded ones have been solid as far as I know. Dell provides firmware almost all of their SSDs.
@@stonent
Yeah, all of my Intel SSDs already have the latest firmware that ships with the latest Intel SSD Toolbox and to no avail.
All SIX of them have failed and again, I started having to RMA the drives back to them, starting from last year.
Regardless, a firmware update isn't going to fix the finite number of erase/program cycles that the NAND flash memory modules/cells have, so again, as I mentioned, I'm using one of them as a swap drive, and the constant and perpetual read/write nature of swapping means that I WILL consume that finite limit of erase/program cycles no matter what I do.
(Even if you have it just as an OS boot drive, unless you're running Linux/Solaris/*BSD, where you can tell the system where to put the swap (tmpfs), both MacOS and Windows will put it on the same drive as the OS drive (although at least in Windows, you can change that after you've installed it).)
If you treat SSDs as WORM, then it works, but then it also defeats the most significant advantage that SSDs have over mechanically rotating HDDs, which is their write speeds.
In other words, no matter which way you look at and/or think about it, the technology is doomed to fail, and this problem will only be exacerbated through the use of TLC and QLC NAND flash memory modules which was invented in order to increase the storage density in the first place.
@@ewenchan1239 we have seen fewer drive failures in the field since the switch to SSDs over the last years. The first reasonable-priced SSDs (e.g. OCZ) were not the most reliable but anything since then , especially from intel, samsung, sandisk etc has been very reliable. (enterprise usage, mostly laptops, as main/only drive)
@@wmopp9100 I've RMA'd six Intel SSDs once the drives started failing last year that were originally purchased 4 years ago, in 2016.
Keep in mind, there is a difference between enterprise grade SSD vs. enterprise SSDs, most notably in the write endurance rating, but it doesn't change the fundamental principles of ALL SSDs that underneath ALL SSDs are NAND flash memory chips/modules that still have a finite number of erase/program cycles.
The way that you increase the write endurance is just by packing more NAND flash modules without advertising an increased capacity. (There were a few drives where you can actually change how much space is set as reserved in order to have variable and user controllable write endurance, where the drive has a total, finite space, but if you advertise a lower capacity, you can increase the write endurance and/or the overall life of the drive (again, until the finite number of erase/program cycles of said underlying NAND flash memory modules/chips are consumed).
This is a screenshot of the Intel SSD Toolbox from the Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD that was sent to me, from Intel, a little over a year ago:
postimg.cc/18LtnJ8n
As you can see, it has already consumed about 27% of its life in about a year and a month since it was sent to me from Intel, from RMAing my original Intel 750 Series 400 GB SSD back then.
At the current rate, it will have about another 3 years left on it (for a total of 4 years) out of a 5 year warranty, and then I will have to RMA this drive as well.
And all this drive is doing right now is its the swap drive for my main system which has 64 GB of RAM.
All SSDs, even enterprise grade SSDs, will fail, once the finite number of erase/program of the NAND flash memory chips/modules has been consumed and there is nothing that can be done afterwards to fix or repair it.
Which also means that unless you treat the SSDs as WORM, once you consume all of the erase/program cycles, the SSD WILL fail, and it doesn't matter if it's consumer grade or enterprise grade drive.
(Again, the only difference with enterprise grade drives is that the total install capacity vs. the usable (or advertised) capacity is a significant ratio when compared to consumer grade drives (and as a consequence of that, the difference in cost as well). The underlying technology, which is the root cause of the failure, is the same regardless of whether it's an enterprise grade drive or a consumer grade drive. Again, the only difference is the ratio of the total installed capacity vs. the usable or advertised capacity. That's the ONLY real difference.)
Thanks.
@@ewenchan1239 if the alternative is a HDD, those have a finite lifetime as well. everything that moves has wear! (in this case, even stuff that doesn't move has wear). so unless we switch to RAM or similar technologies, this is something we have to live with.
you are obviously using the SSDs in a very differnet use-case than a normal (client) OS drive. I think you cannot apply your (database or at least datacenter) experience to clients as the expected amount of writes is very different (and this youtube video is about a client system).
we are using SSDs everywhere except for large volumes of cold-lukewarm data. while client drives fail from time to time. (but at a lower rate than HDDs used to). I cannot remember the last time a server-grade SSD failed.