Planning on using Samsung Magician to adjust the over-provisioning levels on 6x 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs to be used in a single Raid 10 on a 1U Dell R620. The server has 10 total slots and I'm hoping to add an additional 4 drives to the array at some point in the future. The controller is a Perc H710P Mini w/ 1GB, and I'll be running Server 2012 R2. Full specs at the bottom of the post.
From what I understand:
- Hardware raid controllers don't support TRIM.
- The higher the proportion of the total capacity you dedicate to overprovisioning the faster the performance will be because of how SSDs shuffle data around to level wear, and the longer the life of each individual drive will be.
I don't need the maximum capacity of the drives so can get pretty aggressive on the amount dedicated to OP, at this point the only thing running on the server will be a new product I'm launching that has zero users at this point, but which I'm projecting ( hoping ) will grow to a few hundred thousand in the next 6 months.
Full specs: 2x Xeon E5-2680 octacore procs, 256 GB RAM, 6x 1TB 850 Pros in a Raid 10, probably 4x 300G Seagate SAS 10k drives from the original purchase in a 2nd Raid 10.
If it influences the decision much, I'm going to be running a full web app load on it, IIS, MySQL, and a Java-based app server.
Thanks!