The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe is a pretty popular SSD model that is used by many within the VMware Homelab Community. However, in recent months, there have been an alarming amount of reports from owners that their 980 Pro NVMe devices have been failing prematurely due to firmware issues.
Samsung Issues Fix for Dying 980 Pro SSDs https://t.co/BKoZgXE5Nk pic.twitter.com/J1eQfdp1eN
— Tom's Hardware (@tomshardware) January 31, 2023
Samsung has finally acknowledge the problem with a firmware fix and it looks like a simliar fix is also planned for the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe.
While I can not comment on the specific issues with the Samsung 980/990 Pro NVMe devices, I have had my own failures with cheaper Samsung M.2 NVMe devices where I lost my vSAN setup since I only had a single vSAN diskgroup comprised of single cache and capacity SSD for my homelab. While not ideal, this is to be expected since I had no redundancy and consumer hardware can and will fail over time. I ended upgrading both of my SSDs to a Samsung 970 Plus, which luckily is not affected by the firmware issues.
I typically recommend Samsung, Intel and Western Digital NVMe devices as they typically just work with ESXi, especially for homelab purposes where cost is one of the factors. From some of the online posts that I have read about the current Samsung 980/990 Pro issues, it seems that many have lost faith in Samsung and some have even stated that they will no longer consider Samsung for storage purchases.
This was also a simliar sentiment when I recently spoke with a fellow VMware colleague who was also impacted by the firmware issues. As part of our discussion, he had shared a couple of alternative vendors that he has is now using and recommending for his VMware Homelab setup which also includes vSAN. I thought this was good information that could also benefit folks in the community looking for other storage options.
- SK Hynix is not a brand that I have personally used, but have been hearing good things about them and the Gold P31 NVMe is one that my colleague is currently using which is also automatically recognized by ESXi
- Sabrent is another brand that I have not personally used before but I know some folks in the community have also had success with ESXi. The Rocket NVMe is one option that is automatically recognized by ESXi and is used within my colleagues setup. There is also a Rocket Plus NVMe, which is a newer version from Sabrent which is also compatible with ESXi and thanks to Matt Mancini who recently shared it also works great with vSAN.
Are there other non-common NVMe devices that you have found success with ESXi? If so, do leave a comment so that others can also benefit.
As with any VMware Homelab, there are plenty of options and I always recommend folks do their research and check out my VMware Community Homelab project which contains build-of-materials (BOM) from various users within the community, which is a good place to start and see what others have used in their homelab setup.
I've been using the Sabrent Rocket 512GB for Cache and 2TB for capacity in my all flash vSAN for over a year now. https://vmexplorer.com/home-lab-bom/
I've updated the article, thanks for sharing Matt
Hey Will I use the Sabrent Rocket 2 and 4TB for my homelab and had them for about two plus years now and I haven't experienced any issues with them. I am also using the samsung 970 Plus as well.
I may have been alone in this issue, but I had a set of 4x SK Hynix Gold P31 NVMe 2TB SSDs I had tried to use as independent datastores in an ESXi 7 host. However, due to the way those SSDs reported their serial numbers in ESXi (just a series of X's), it would only recognize one SSD at a time for creating datastores (regardless of PCIe slot or adapter card used). I was able to pass all four SSDs into a TrueNAS Scale VM on the same host and it worked without issue in TrueNAS to create a pool with all four SSDs. But a note of caution for using multiple SK Hynix Gold P31 NVMe SSDs within the same host for VMFS datastores.
Appreciate you sharing Curtis. This seems like an issue the vendor could help fix as I know typically they have tools to update/change serials ... wondering if you had reached out as it would seem strange that multiple devices would all have same serial
Hi Will, not so long ago I was looking for a new NVMe drive for my Lenovo Tiny Lab and indeed, Samsung 980 Pro was my initial choice. I then however started to come across many user complaints on reddit, about this very issue. So I eventually ended up with Kingston KC3000 1TB version, works flawlessly with ESXi 7.0
Hi guys. Kingston KC3000 (2TB version) works perfectly for my ESXi 7.0 Lab as well. I've managed to write 150+ GB file on its datastore (storage vmotion) with stable high throughput. To keep it cool, I've put it into be quiet! MC1 cooler. Also, I'm able to read its temperatures by following this VMware KB: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2040405. I'm planning to employ my Zabbix monitoring to read and store the temperature statistics.
I am using micro m1 for cache with pny 1 tb drives for capacity on esxi 7. I have not tried them on esxi 8