SSD or USB Key?

Zitat von Blabla

The thing is: why should I spend 40€ without knowing if I'll have TRIM, if I can spend 25 for a 16GB SD card and a good usb3 adapter?If I was certain to have TRIM them 15€ can be worth, otherwise is just complicate things

You have an Asrock H170M Pro4S logic board so you have a free M.2 PCIe slot don't you ?

If you want something cheap and reliable why don't you buy a 16 GB Intel Optane SSD ?
Those SSD were expensive but can be found new for ~20€ and have both an excellent endurance and reliability.

A 16 GB Optane M10 SSD has a 395TBW lifespan while cheap 120GB SSD only have 40TBW lifespan...
I can testify that a 16GB boot drive for OMV is a good choice : those devices are fast and ultra reliable, they make a perfect choice for OMV.

Also I like a lot the fact that, once selected as a boot device, any NVMe device (as the octane) will always stay the first boot device.
If you manage many SATA drive and have one as your boot device you can be annoyed with the wrong drive being selected as boot device and your OMV machine not booting...

Zitat von Blabla

The thing is: why should I spend 40€ without knowing if I'll have TRIM, if I can spend 25 for a 16GB SD card and a good usb3 adapter?If I was certain to have TRIM them 15€ can be worth, otherwise is just complicate things

You have an Asrock H170M Pro4S logic board so you have a free M.2 PCIe slot don't you ?

If you want something cheap and reliable why don't you buy a 16 GB Intel Optane SSD ?
Those SSD were once expensive but can now be found new for ~20€. And Optanes drives have an incomparable endurance and reliability.

A 16 GB Optane M10 SSD has a 395TBW lifespan, while a SATA 120GB SSD only have 40TBW lifespan (and I don't talk about USB devices, even SLC)

I can testify that a small 16GB optane SSD as the boot drive for OMV is a good choice : those devices are fast and ultra reliable.

Also I like a lot the fact that, once selected as a boot device, any NVMe device (as the octane) will always stay the first boot device.
If you manage many SATA drive and have one as your boot device you will be annoyed with the wrong drive being selected as boot device and your OMV machine not booting...
This never occurs with NVMe boot drives...

16GB is more than adequate for the OMV system. You don't want to put the Plex metadatabase or Dockers on the system drive anyway because you can never predict their growth.

I started with OMV 2.x five years ago on a 16GB SSD. Even after upgrading it to 3.x, 4.x, and now to 5.x it still only uses 8.5GB.

I will admit buying a few 32GB SSDs just in case things do grow to be more than 16GB, but this isn't going to happen anytime soon.

I am in the US. I have been buying 16GB Samsung SSDS on ebay for many years. The last batch I got was a lot of three pieces for $18.00 shipped on November 30, 2019. There are still some to be had, but not at the price I paid.

The reason I use 16GB drives is that I backup using dd which copies the entire disk, not just the used space. Backups are automated and daily and I keep the most recent seven days. At 16GB each the space needed to store them is reasonable. If they were 120GB each, it would not be reasonable to me.

Zitat von Blabla

Not sure where you live, but I can't find a 16GB SSD anymore. On my build I have a 60GB because it was the cheapest one I could find at that time. Right now you can buy a 120 or 240GB SSD for 20/30€. Why going for the trouble to find a 16GB when you can just buy a 120GB?

Maybe you didn't read my post and maybe you can't compare apples to oranges...

Yes you can find 16 GB SSD and those are Intel Optane SSD, we don't quite speak about any low cost TLC SSD (or worse, QLC with a bad controller).
Instead I am talking about intel Optane memory which is far more robust than QLC/TLC/MLC flash memory, even better than SLC flash in terms of life expectancy.

I don't say that 120 GB SSDs are all bad..some have a pretty good lifespan like the Adata SU800 which has a 100 TBW capacity.
But many low cost 120 GB SSD are cheap models which don't have a very good controller and they have "only" a 40 TBW lifespan, which may be too few in some cases with OMV.

When you look for a reliable SSD, you may look at many parameters : its brand, its controller, and its "lifespan" given in TBW (TerraBytes Written).

And I only say that if you can find brand new, Intel 16 GB Optane drives that have a 395 TBW lifespan for 25€ new in box with a 5 year intel warranty, well you may think about it, don't you ?

You can even get new "system pulled" 16 GB optane drives for 10$ on ebay.

I have build ~20 OMV systems in my life, some with low cost 30/60 GB SSDs which have run for 5 years and are dead because they have already worn out.

If anyone ask me to choose between a SLC USB drive, a TLC 120 GB Sata SSD, or a 16 GB optane, I go for the optane..

I've ran bare metal OMV and now virtualized OMV on an intel 600p M.2 drive and seen no wear based on smart data.

Look around on ebay. I can still find used 16GB Samsung 2.5 SSDs for ~20USD.

Excellent thread! Thank you!

shayari pro

Hey there,

Any advantage on running the OS on a SSD over a USB key? I'm going to need the SATA port and I'm considering changing the boot drive. Any advice?

Thanks

I run mine on a 16GB 2.5in SSD in an external USB case.

Zitat von tkaiser

No. Both use flash cells so they suffer from the same problem and quality of components is not detemined by the product category.

It's perfectly easy to buy a crappy (m)SATA SSD on Aliexpress or something off eBay that implements technology from a decade ago which will die way earlier compared to an industrial SLC USB thumbdrive. There is no magic involved, these are just different packages using different host interfaces and you have to look a little bit closer.

There exist good quality consumer SSDs that will outlive yourself by decades but also crappy SSDs ('buy cheap, buy twice' -- this simple rule exists here too) that consist of some eMMC combined with an outdated controller not implementing TRIM and faking some of the SMART attributes (eg. temperature). Such an SSD can be a much worse buy compared to an USB pendrive. And then there exist counterfeit SSDs as well (just enter 'counterfeit SSDs' or eg. 'counterfeit EVO 850' in your search engine of choice)

IMO it's pretty easy to deal with the problem:

• always check for counterfeit flash media directly after purchase with either F3 or H2testw (also with SSDs especially if you're following the 'buy cheap, buy twice' route)
• since chances are great that you got counterfeit stuff choose sales channels with a 'no questions asked' return/refund policy (especially never ever buy 'genuine flash' on places like Aliexpress, eBay and the like)
• If you want to prevent your flash media wearing out too fast ensure that you are able to TRIM (here good/genuine SSDs win over USB pendrives, but even SD cards outperform USB pendrives here since they can be trimmed from time to time by sending CMD38/DISCARD)
• ALWAYS use the flashmemory plugin with flash media and this applies to SSDs too (since especially when you bought a crappy one that fakes TRIM it will die way earlier than necessary without the plugin). Setting up a cronjob that syncs stuff back to 'disk' hourly or daily is a good idea since it still greatly reduces 'write amplification' while ensuring that if your OMV box should crash only small amounts of logs and metadata are lost

BTW: people recommend sometimes SLC flash (more expensive USB pendrives). Fraudsters love this since it allows to sell cheap flash relabeled as SLC for much more money

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Thanks for these really interesting posts !

However, I still have a question that is not clearly answered, is OMV 6 performances are better with SSD drives than USB pendrives ?

Today, I am using a 120 Go SSD drive, however, I am interested in releasing a Sata port for a hard disk drive.

Have you made some performances comparisons between SSD and USB pendrives ?

Thanks

I have run OMV from SSD and USB pen drives. In my experience the performance difference of the OMV GUI interface is negligible.

Zitat von crashtest

It depends on your use case:
- If you're using OMV as a NAS, there's not much difference. Boot time will be a bit faster with an SSD. On the other hand, USB3 thumbdrives are plenty fast to boot up. (Depending on the hardware, less than a minute.) Further, if your server is up 24x7, boot times don't really matter.
- If you're hosting a web page, a media server or running a bunch of Dockers from the boot drive, an SSD might make sense.

If you want to use the 120GB SSD and avoid rebuilding on an thumbdrive, I'd consider doing what gderf does with his SSD's. Get an external SATA to USB adapter, with a short cable, plug the SSD in a USB port and set it on top of the case. (And you'll recover a SATA port.)

Thanks,

I am using OMV as server with some docker container as Adguard, jdownloader, nextcloud, home assistant.

Is an SSD drive over USB has the same speed as over sata port ?

I thought that USB pendrive could be nice because we can easily backup the entire USB stick or have several to test some stuff and easily come back to the last OMV backup if there is a problem.

Is it possible to do that with two different drive, one sata drive for the nominal setup, and one USB stick to test, and transfert OMV os between them if the USB stick configuration is working?