has anyone experience with using consumer SSDs like the Samsung 850 Pro in an HP ProLiant Gen9 server with a Smart Array P440ar controller?
Judging by various reports about older versions (Gen6 to Gen8) third-party SSDs seem to work in principal, but might cause problems with the monitoring features of the server. I would like to know if this is still the case, or if it got better/worse.
Some background information:
We are looking for a development server for a team of 7 to 12 people. The server would host multiple VMs (Hyper-V) running SharePoint 2010 and 2013, potentially each with its own SQL Server installation.
Our hardware guy advises strongly against using third-party drives, saying consumer SSDs would not run at all, and wants to use HP 10k SAS disks. I would prefer 8x 1 TB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs in a RAID 10 or 1 configuration (the 850s GC should be good enough so we can lose TRIM support).
My take on this is: We do not need enterprise-level reliability and longevity, nor will the write-volume be high enough to cause wear-level problems. What we need is high IOPS and enough space for multiple VMs. The HP SSDs seem way overpriced, given these requirements. Missing compatibility would be a deal-breaker of course.
I don't have any experience with server hardware, though. All I know is that my notebook with a 3 year old 120 GB OCZ SSD by far out-performs our existing server with 6x 10k SAS drives, as it does the development system at a client (also HDD-based, unknown specifics/configuration). The new server would have larger SAS disks, and more of them (8 instead of 6), but I still would expect the performance to be considerably inferior when compared to an SSD setup.
Feel free to comment on the general topic (server requirements for SharePoint development).
