Matt Larson <larsonmattr(a)gmail.com> writes: We have tested some of the 860QVOs and their performance was quite bad - they'd drop down somewhere around 24~36 MB/s for random I/O. We did not see such bevahiour for the 860/870EVOs though, which perform around 260~480MB/s. Best regards, Nico -- Sustainable and modern Infrastructures by ungleich.ch

Hi Matt, Yes, we've experimented a bit with consumer SSDs, and also done some benchmarks. The main reason for SSDs is typically to improve IOPS for small writes, since even HDDs will usually give you quite good aggregated bandwidth as long as you have enough of them - but for high-IOPS usage most (all) consumer SSDs we have tested perform badly in Ceph, in particular for writes. The reason for this is that Ceph requires sync writes, and since consumer SSDs (and now even some cheap datacenter ones) don't have capacitors for power-loss-protection they cannot use the volatile caches that give them (semi-fake) good performance on desktops. If that sounds bad, you should be even more careful if you shop around until you find a cheap drive that performs well - because there have historically been consumer drives that lie and acknowledge a sync even if the data is just in volatile memory rather than safe :-) Samsung PM883 one relative cheap drives that we've been quite happy with - at least if your application is not highly write-intensive. If it's write-intensive you might need the longer-endurace SM883 (or similar from other vendors). Now, having said that, we have had pretty decent experience with a way to partly cheat around these limitations: since we have a good dozen large servers with mixed HDDs we also have 2-3 NVMe samsung PM983 M.2 drives per server on PCIe cards for the DB/wal for these OSDs. It seems to work remarkably well to do this for consumer SSDs to, i.e. let each 4TB el cheapo SATA SSD (we used Samsung 860) use a ~100GB db/wal partition on an NVMe drive. This gives very nice low latencies in rados benchmarks, although they are still ~50% higher than with proper enterprise SSDs. Caveats: - Think about balancing IOPS. If you have 10 SSD OSDs share a single NVMe WAL device you will likely be limited by the NVMe IOPS instead. - if the NVMe drive dies, all the corresponding OSDs die. - This might work for read-intensive applications, but if you try it for write-intensive applications you will wear out the consumer SSDs (check their write endurance). - When doing rados benchmarks, you will still see latency/bandwidth go up/down and periodically throttle to almost zero for consumer SSDs, presumably because they are busy flushing some sort of intermediate storage. In comparison, even the relatively cheap pm883 "just works" at constant high bandwidth close to the bus limit, and the latency is a constant low fraction of a millisecond in ceph. In summary, while somewhat possible, I simply don't think it's worth the hassle/risk/complex setup with consumer drives (and god knows I can be a cheap bastard at times ;-), but if you absolutely have to i would at least avoid the absolutely cheapest QVO models (note that the QVO models have a sustained bandwidth of only 80-160MB/s - that's like a magnetic spinner!) - and if you don't put the WAL on a better device I predict you'll regret it once you start doing benchmarks in RADOS. Cheers, Erik On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 10:11 PM Matt Larson <larsonmattr(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Erik Lindahl <erik.lindahl(a)dbb.su.se> Professor of Biophysics, Dept. Biochemistry & Biophysics, Stockholm University Science for Life Laboratory, Box 1031, 17121 Solna, Sweden