ESXi: Which SSD / important SSD parameters

ssdvmware-esxi

I want to setup a small ESXi server, which has to be silent, therefore I will use a SSD drive, however I am not sure which one I shall use and which parameters of a SSD are important for usage with ESXi?

I am thinking on one of these (price rougly the same, capacity enough for me)

  • OCZ Onyx 32GB
  • Intel SSD 320 Series 40GB
  • OCZ Vertex 30GB
  • Kingston SSDNow V-Series 30GB

For example the Onyx is faster in writing than the Tntel SSD, but the Intel SSD performs better on 4K, but I have to admit I have no clue whether 4K is important for ESXi! The Kignston seems to have an agressive cleanup / trim like behaviour built-in maybe that's useful because ESXi supports no trim?

Best Answer

A silent ESXi server, well there's a first time for everything I guess - are you sure this is for a professional/production system? I'd be really interested in what you're doing here.

Anyway it seems a bit odd to be a) using an SSD as your main datastore at all and b) worrying about storage performance when you'll be using a passively cooled CPU (presumably). Unless you know SSDs are the right solution for you and that your full end to end system will benefit from the extra performance these higher-end SSDs then I'd go for pretty much any of them but with an emphasis on choosing the one with the most over-commit memory.