On 2021-03-07 at 17:48, Felix Miata wrote: > Don't settle for a motherboard that lacks any M.2 ports that support > NVME 2280 form factor storage. Prefer more than one on any board > bigger than ITX. I've see reports of <3 second cold boot to > multi-user times using NVME. Best I've seen here is <6 seconds with a > cheap 120GB NVME and a two core 3.0GHz Pentium G3220 CPU. At that point I'd expect the bottleneck is elsewhere in the system, rather than with the storage device itself. M.2 SSDs can get *stupidly* fast. > Also be very wary of any power supply included with a case. IME, > these lightweight and cheaply made power supplies invariably provide > the worst reliability of any type of electronic product I've ever > encountered. The best power supplies are heavy. If its weight isn't > provided in its specs, look elsewhere, for as much above 3lbs as you > can find, preferably more than 4lbs, and if the cabling is much more > than minimal, more than 5lbs. If not using a power hungry two-slot > multi-fan powered-directly-by-power supply graphics card, lots of > 3.5" drives, or multiple discrete CPUs, odds are anything more than a > 400W power supply is overkill. Significant excess capacity wastes > power needlessly. Thanks for the advice. Any power-related advice for SSDs? In the system I'm planning to build, I'm expecting to have something along the lines of two M.2 SSDs (RAID-1), presumably in the NVMe 2280 form factor you specify, and eight or more SATA SSDs in a 2.5" form factor (RAID-6), along with a discrete GPU, probably a discrete sound card, a collection of fans, and of course whatever the motherboard and case may need (not excluding USB ports and the devices attached to them). I'm not at all sure what to target in terms of PSU capacity for something like that. I want modularity, reliability, and a certain amount of extra headroom in case I want to either expand later or just replace some parts with others that are more power-hungry, but what wattage level is appropriate is really hard to judge; most of the PSU calculators (etc.) out there, that I recall finding, seem to assume no more than two hard drives. In my current system (two SATA SSDs, four SATA HDDs, plus an extra port for a cold spare drive in case one of the RAID arrays develops a problem), the storage subsystem is probably the single largest part of the power consumption except when the GPU is running high, but I don't know of a practical way to calculate that with the tools I have available. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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