SSD replacement of HDD in microscope controller PCs

[olivier.burri]

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Hi List!

Since a few years, we have tried replacing the old HDDs on some of our microscopes with SSDs for performance reasons.

In most cases this works well, but we got into an argument with our IT department that was recommending to just use simple entry level SSDs like Samsung EVO Pros or Basic, whereas other IT companies offering us SSDs for our workstations swear by the Intel DC series and similar, considering the usually large amount of reading/writing/swapping that happens on these systems.

The question then was: is it worth paying the premium for these data-center grade SSDs which are roughly 2-3 times the price of consumer-grade disks?

We've detected that the lifespan of our SSDs is rather limited: about 30% of our (Non-intel) SSDs failed after 2 years when used as a system drive, the microscope data being written to a separate disk

Has anyone else gone the way of the SSD? What is your experience on their rate of failure and general experience using them?

Thanks for any input

Oli

Olivier Burri
Imaging Specialist - Image Analyst
BIOIMAGING AND OPTICS PLATFORM
AI 0140
1015 Lausanne,
Switzerland
https://biop.epfl.ch

[George McNamara]

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Hi Oli,

I have mostly used Samsung Pro SATA-6 SSDs. Partly because Samsung
provides Disk Migration software, partly because the Intel stuff is
premium pricing and their specifications are nothing special.

Treat all drives as consumables! I recommend cloning onto a new SSD once
a year (and label and leave the old drive inside the PC case ... yes, I
suppose you could ping-pong between two drives). In the past, small
capacity SATA-6 SSDs (256 Gb) had lower speed than larger capacity
drives, current generation ones are listed as similar, so 256 Gb Samsun
Pro for under $100 is a trivial investment.

Now, in 2020, with NVMe on new motherboards, Samsung NVMe (M.2) is the
way to go: PCIe gen3 NVMe are ~3000 MB/s vs single SATA-6 are ~500 MB/s.
I avoid RAID or Microsoft Storage Space drive arrays for boot drive.

The 'state of the art' now is PCIe gen 4 and some of the newest NVMe are
~7000 MB/s -- I check out TomsHardware.com for reviews - not the only
online resource, nor the only fast drive -- see

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-unveils-980-pro-pcie-40-ssds-up-to-7000-mbs-for-a-client-pc

"Samsung's 980 Pro drives feature quite impressive performance. The
company promises up to 7,000 MB/s sequential read speeds as well as up
to 5,000 MB/s sequential write speeds." -- I've not checked whether
Intel has SSds with similar performance (a different question than mean
time between failure -- I suggest current hardware is often obsolete
before user's product fails).

With NVidia about to release RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 Ampere GPUs, which
are PCIe gen 4 (can be used in gen3) -- should be amazing performance
for GPU deconvolution (if the GPU software is compatible with Ampere
architecture), and some AMD CPUs being able to spew data to/from a lot
of PCIe gen 4 lanes (Intel may soon have gen 4 support), cloning the
current PC into a new "gen 4" box with NVMe SSD(s) each for OS and data,
will be the way to go (also 10 Gbe or faster Ethernet) (note; Leica SP8
etc use specific IP address to communicate with scanhead, need that
address ... other microscope vendors may also have components with
specific addressing).

I've mentioned previously, for data drives on our confocal microscope
PCs (Leica SP8 on HP Z640 and Olympus FV3000RS on HP Z440) I have been
using ASUS Hyper M.2 NVMe PCIe cards (PCIe gen 3), holds four NVMe
cards. They now offer "gen 4",

asus hyper m.2 x16 gen 4 card (PCIe x16 slot, holds up to four NVMe).

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-Expansion-Card/dp/B084HMHGSP

So: I encourage discussing with I.T. moving up to new motherboard, PCIe
gen 4, NVMe(s), 10 Gbe Ethernet (or faster), new NVidia (if you have GPU
deconvolution ... and if not, maybe should add to facility).

enjoy,

George

p.s. I also strongly encourage good line conditioner / uninterruptible
power supply for every PC and microscope, for 'smooth, steady power' and
to be able to sacrifice a (say) $150 line conditioner if the building
experiences a power surge (I may still have a piece of concrete that was
blasted off the roof of our lab at UW-Madison).


On 9/14/2020 5:40 AM, Burri Olivier wrote:

> *****
> To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
> http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
> Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
> *****
>
> Hi List!
>
> Since a few years, we have tried replacing the old HDDs on some of our microscopes with SSDs for performance reasons.
>
> In most cases this works well, but we got into an argument with our IT department that was recommending to just use simple entry level SSDs like Samsung EVO Pros or Basic, whereas other IT companies offering us SSDs for our workstations swear by the Intel DC series and similar, considering the usually large amount of reading/writing/swapping that happens on these systems.
>
> The question then was: is it worth paying the premium for these data-center grade SSDs which are roughly 2-3 times the price of consumer-grade disks?
>
> We've detected that the lifespan of our SSDs is rather limited: about 30% of our (Non-intel) SSDs failed after 2 years when used as a system drive, the microscope data being written to a separate disk
>
> Has anyone else gone the way of the SSD? What is your experience on their rate of failure and general experience using them?
>
> Thanks for any input
>
> Oli
>
> Olivier Burri
> Imaging Specialist - Image Analyst
> BIOIMAGING AND OPTICS PLATFORM
> AI 0140
> 1015 Lausanne,
> Switzerland
> https://biop.epfl.ch
>
>
>

[Zdenek Svindrych-2]

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Hi Oli,

I'm surprised your drives fail after 2 years. Some of our microscope
workstations are configured with SSD drives for the OS (Windows 7). One of
the older ones uses Hynix SC300, which has quite poor TBW specs. Newer ones
typically come with NVMe SSDs (Samsung SM961 or 960 PRO (at least I hope
they're not EVOs)).

I've been using ADATA SU800 for upgrades of older computers (
https://www.adata.com/upload/downloadfile/Datasheet_SU800_EN_20180905.pdf),
the specs are not as great as Samsung 860 PRO (200 TBW vs 300 TBW for 256
GB model), but it's half the price and I've been happy with it.

As always, back up your OS drives! It can save you some time and headache
(reinstalling from scratch may be a day-long process, especially with
Windows 7 and all the updates  :-).

Best, zdenek


On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 6:21 AM Burri Olivier <[hidden email]> wrote:

> *****
> To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
> http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
> Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
> *****
>
> Hi List!
>
> Since a few years, we have tried replacing the old HDDs on some of our
> microscopes with SSDs for performance reasons.
>
> In most cases this works well, but we got into an argument with our IT
> department that was recommending to just use simple entry level SSDs like
> Samsung EVO Pros or Basic, whereas other IT companies offering us SSDs for
> our workstations swear by the Intel DC series and similar, considering the
> usually large amount of reading/writing/swapping that happens on these
> systems.
>
> The question then was: is it worth paying the premium for these
> data-center grade SSDs which are roughly 2-3 times the price of
> consumer-grade disks?
>
> We've detected that the lifespan of our SSDs is rather limited: about 30%
> of our (Non-intel) SSDs failed after 2 years when used as a system drive,
> the microscope data being written to a separate disk
>
> Has anyone else gone the way of the SSD? What is your experience on their
> rate of failure and general experience using them?
>
> Thanks for any input
>
> Oli
>
> Olivier Burri
> Imaging Specialist - Image Analyst
> BIOIMAGING AND OPTICS PLATFORM
> AI 0140
> 1015 Lausanne,
> Switzerland
> https://biop.epfl.ch
>
>
>
>

--
--
Zdenek Svindrych, Ph.D.
Research Scientist - Microscopy Imaging Specialist
Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

[Ralf Palmisano]

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Hi Oli,

I can add that we are using EVO Pro now for quite some time, not only on
microscope controller PCs, but also on one of our really sophisticated
powerful post-processing workstation. The latter one certainly do stress
the SSDs much more more as they face sort of 24/7 usage with filesize in
the two digit GB range (via remote sessions possible). So far a year and
a half there has not occured a single failure  within the raid systems.

Cheese

Ralph

Am 14/09/2020 um 11:40 schrieb Burri Olivier:

> *****
> To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
> http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
> Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
> *****
>
> Hi List!
>
> Since a few years, we have tried replacing the old HDDs on some of our microscopes with SSDs for performance reasons.
>
> In most cases this works well, but we got into an argument with our IT department that was recommending to just use simple entry level SSDs like Samsung EVO Pros or Basic, whereas other IT companies offering us SSDs for our workstations swear by the Intel DC series and similar, considering the usually large amount of reading/writing/swapping that happens on these systems.
>
> The question then was: is it worth paying the premium for these data-center grade SSDs which are roughly 2-3 times the price of consumer-grade disks?
>
> We've detected that the lifespan of our SSDs is rather limited: about 30% of our (Non-intel) SSDs failed after 2 years when used as a system drive, the microscope data being written to a separate disk
>
> Has anyone else gone the way of the SSD? What is your experience on their rate of failure and general experience using them?
>
> Thanks for any input
>
> Oli
>
> Olivier Burri
> Imaging Specialist - Image Analyst
> BIOIMAGING AND OPTICS PLATFORM
> AI 0140
> 1015 Lausanne,
> Switzerland
> https://biop.epfl.ch
>
>
>

--
Ralph Palmisano
Head - Optical Imaging Centre Erlangen

Fellow Royal Microscopical Society
Member Royal Society of Medicine

Speaker Scientific Advisory Board "German Society for Microscopy and Image Analysis"
Board of Directors "Core Technologies for Life Sciences"

Cauerstr. 3
91058 Erlangen, Germany

[phone] (Office)
[phone] (Secretary)

www.oice.uni-erlangen.de