Hard Drive Options for "Budget" Workstation.

soul_in_a_fishbowl · March 10, 2017, 13:24

I recently started getting in to CFD and I've been playing around Autodesk CFD, Ansys, and openFOAM. Right now I am putting together a budget workstation and I'm stuck at the hard drive.

Current Parts:
HP Z820 off Ebay with:
(2) Xeon E5-2690
(16) 4GB DDR3 10600R RAM 64gb total
(1) Quadro K4000

Now to the hard drive options:

BOOT: (1) 512GB HP Z Turbo Drive G1 PCIe SSD 1170/930 MB/s
STORAGE: (4) 2-3TB 10k SATA HDDs for internal bays for backup and long term storage

Notes: the computer does not support NVMe so the SSD would be handicapped by AHCI, but putting the boot drive in a PCIe slot frees up more room for internal HDDs

Cost: $350 for PCIe. I already have plenty of HDDs

----------------------------------------------------

BOOT: (2) 2 Samsung 850 EVO SSDs in Raid 0
STORAGE: (2) 2-3TB 10k SATA HDDs for internal bays. (External Storage optional).

Notes: Using the two SSDs, I could potentially have faster reads/writes, but I also double the failure rate and take up two of the bays that I could have used for HDD.

Cost: $200 for two SSDs. Again, I have the HDDs already.

Are there any major benefits to choosing 1 of these setups over the other (other than my notes)?

flotus1 · March 10, 2017, 14:25

Do you have any specific workload that benefits from fast I/O?
Otherwise my recommendation would be option 3: one SATA-SSD, no RAID.

soul_in_a_fishbowl · March 10, 2017, 14:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by flotus1

Do you have any specific workload that benefits from fast I/O?
Otherwise my recommendation would be option 3: one SATA-SSD, no RAID.

I am doing a lot of transient flow simulations and also will bet editing animations of the simulations.

It is my understanding that is where I would see the most benefit from the increased speed.

1 SSD could probably do the trick, but I would at least want some sort of redundancy or backup in there in case of failures.

flotus1 · March 11, 2017, 04:54

All right, that seems like a workload that might benefit from faster I/O.
Are there any HP Zdrives available for a "budget" price? Which version exactly are we talking about? The PCIe-adapter with an m.2 SSD? 350$ seems quite expensive in this case.

For the fastest drive in the system I would rather not go for redundancy. It won't provide enough disc space to hold large amounts of data anyway. It might be better to use it like a scratch disk. Run and analyze your simulations on it, and when you are done copy the data to the slower drives on your system or the backup server.

soul_in_a_fishbowl · March 13, 2017, 11:30

The Z-drive was just the first go-to option because after some reading on the HP forums, I found out that there is iffy compatibility with other drives via PCIe. But, I believe any m2 drive will work with an adapter as long as they support AHCI. This ends up being an issue because every new PCIe SSD only supports NVMe. If only HP would update the BIOS on the 820 to support NVMe....

But yes, the $350 is a bit much. I could get an SM951 256gb for around $150 and then do as you said and just dump everything onto some old HDDs.

March 10, 2017, 13:24	Hard Drive Options for "Budget" Workstation.	#1
soul_in_a_fishbowl New Member Mitch Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 3 Rep Power: 9	I recently started getting in to CFD and I've been playing around Autodesk CFD, Ansys, and openFOAM. Right now I am putting together a budget workstation and I'm stuck at the hard drive. Current Parts: HP Z820 off Ebay with: (2) Xeon E5-2690 (16) 4GB DDR3 10600R RAM 64gb total (1) Quadro K4000 Now to the hard drive options: BOOT: (1) 512GB HP Z Turbo Drive G1 PCIe SSD 1170/930 MB/s STORAGE: (4) 2-3TB 10k SATA HDDs for internal bays for backup and long term storage Notes: the computer does not support NVMe so the SSD would be handicapped by AHCI, but putting the boot drive in a PCIe slot frees up more room for internal HDDs Cost: $350 for PCIe. I already have plenty of HDDs ---------------------------------------------------- BOOT: (2) 2 Samsung 850 EVO SSDs in Raid 0 STORAGE: (2) 2-3TB 10k SATA HDDs for internal bays. (External Storage optional). Notes: Using the two SSDs, I could potentially have faster reads/writes, but I also double the failure rate and take up two of the bays that I could have used for HDD. Cost: $200 for two SSDs. Again, I have the HDDs already. Are there any major benefits to choosing 1 of these setups over the other (other than my notes)?

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March 10, 2017, 14:25		#2
flotus1 Super Moderator Alex Join Date: Jun 2012 Location: Germany Posts: 3,399 Rep Power: 46	Do you have any specific workload that benefits from fast I/O? Otherwise my recommendation would be option 3: one SATA-SSD, no RAID.

March 11, 2017, 04:54		#4
flotus1 Super Moderator Alex Join Date: Jun 2012 Location: Germany Posts: 3,399 Rep Power: 46	All right, that seems like a workload that might benefit from faster I/O. Are there any HP Zdrives available for a "budget" price? Which version exactly are we talking about? The PCIe-adapter with an m.2 SSD? 350$ seems quite expensive in this case. For the fastest drive in the system I would rather not go for redundancy. It won't provide enough disc space to hold large amounts of data anyway. It might be better to use it like a scratch disk. Run and analyze your simulations on it, and when you are done copy the data to the slower drives on your system or the backup server.

March 13, 2017, 11:30		#5
soul_in_a_fishbowl New Member Mitch Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 3 Rep Power: 9	The Z-drive was just the first go-to option because after some reading on the HP forums, I found out that there is iffy compatibility with other drives via PCIe. But, I believe any m2 drive will work with an adapter as long as they support AHCI. This ends up being an issue because every new PCIe SSD only supports NVMe. If only HP would update the BIOS on the 820 to support NVMe.... But yes, the $350 is a bit much. I could get an SM951 256gb for around $150 and then do as you said and just dump everything onto some old HDDs.