Which SATA SSD is good

TrueNAS General
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Which SATA SSD would be good for my Plex and data NAS? I’d appreciate the recommendation. :folded_hands:

Case Rosewild Nas Pro (Hot-Swap)
MoBo: Gigabyte h410m v
Core i5 10600k
DDR4 16 GB

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Can you be a bit more detailed on what you are looking for? Is this going to be a single SSD or are you going to do a mirrored pair? Will this SSD do mostly reads or read & writes?

Usual advice is to stick to well know name brands and try to match the SSD to the work load. If you can get NAS or server models, those are usually considered better. Some consumer models are considered low quality or fail early.

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And never ever ever buy a Samsung QVO

[OK - I admit I may have a slightly irrational dislike of these bits of junk]

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4

You have

  • 1 * m.2 (PCIe 2x4)
  • 4 * SATA 6Gb

You need a boot disk and a data pool.

Now I personally don’t like using a PCIe slot as a boot drive as I consider it a waste of performance - but in your stated case it seems like the logical choice. Get a small 16-64GB NVMe drive, like an M.2 Optane as you will never have to worry about endurance. Personally I think 32GB is the sweetspot (16GB runs out too quickly with different boot environments)

Keep the SATA ports for HDD’s and your plex data pool - it doesn’t need anything faster.

Your case can take many more drives - you just don’t have the controller. You don’t need a eGPU as the onboard graphics should handle any transcoding you need. If you need more drives then get an LSI HBA card and put that in your PCIe X16 slot. Consider 1 (preferably 2) SSD’s to run as an APPs pool, to actually run Plex from - but test first with just HHD’s and a single pool.

Whilst the optanes are not as cheap as they used to be - they are still cheap for what you get. Note that the M.2 H10 models are not true optanes and are in fact more normal NAND with a small optane cache on it and without the optane endurance (not that that really matters for a boot drive). You don’t need the size of the H10 models which would be wasted.

Lots of other options - but they all involve throwing money at the issue / making things more complex. None of which seem nessesary for the very limited info you provided

5

What do you want to use the SSD for ?

  • As a boot device ? Then go for a cheap and possible no-name NVME or the mentioned Optanes.

  • As a pool for the apps ? I like the WD Red SN700 NVMEs. Use a simple carrier card to run it off your 16x slot. Or if the slot supports bifurcation, a mirror pair of them.

  • As data storage ? How much space do you need in the next 5 years ? With only 4 SATA ports you are limited to 2 pairs of mirrors , a RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 config. With SSDs you could be fine with a RAIDz1 config (if you have a backup). Older, used Intel DC Enterprise SSDs, or used Micron ECO/Pros can sometimes be found for cheap on ebay. But even WD Blue SSDs will probably be ok for a non-write intensive use case.

I would not run the apps from HDDs. Especially Plex, that generates a ton of small metadata files.

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Who cares? The boot device may not make full use of a NVMe port… but an empty slot gives a performance of ZERO.

It looks like the OP may actually need two NVMe drives:

  • A boot device—cheap second-hand 100-128 GB drive (“laptop upgrade”); and
  • A (single drive) app pool for Plex—unless the HDD pool is enough, it depends how many apps there may be.

If so, the boot drive can use the PCIe x1 slot with an adapter, and leave the M.2 slot for the app pool.
For a mirrored app pool, check in BIOS if your motherboard support x8x4x4 bifurcation on the x16 slot: There are adapters to use this for two M.2 drives and low-profile PCIe card. (But if more drives are needed, I’d suggest getting a better motherboard first rather than a HBA.)

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It would be 8 HDDs or SATA drives: 4 for storage and 4 VDEVs.
I have a SAS HBA card compatible with an LSI 9300-8i PCIe SATA expansion card.
I have an Adata Legend 710 M.2 SSD for the system.

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Thanks for the information, I’ll keep it in mind

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It would be 8 HDDs or SATA drives: 4 for storage and 4 VDEVs.
I have a SAS HBA card compatible with an LSI 9300-8i PCIe SATA expansion card.
I have an Adata Legend 710 M.2 SSD for the system.
The Rosewill Thor Nas Pro (Hot-Swap) case for 8 discs

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I would use a slower SATA for the boot pool.
No need for lighting speed, plus SATA cannot go beyond 400 something MB/sec.

Use the much faster NvME for VMs, apps, or ZIL if you can really use it.

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sATA 3 protocol allows about 600MB/sec theoretical transfer speeds, what SSD-s usually get really close to.

IN HDD-s the mechanical struccture is the limiting factor.

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