I can buy 10 of SAS Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM 128MB drives for $50 each, are they good for plotting, how are they compared to SSD or NVMe’s speed-wise
I bought 16x of these off Amazon @ $14.95 each:
DELL 300GB 10K 6GBPS 2.5INCH SAS HDD PGHJG (Renewed)
I have them setup in multiple RAID 0 groups, 2 drives per. I also have 5x Samsung NVME drives and manage just over 50 plots a day on my smaller AMD 5950x system. The system usually has 20+ plots running and the SAS plots take about 2-hours longer than the Samsung NVME plots. I do run the SAS Plots 1x at a time, overlap in Stage 4 when it kicks off a new one but that’s it. On the Samsung I only run 1x plot per in Stage 1x but will run 3x plots off each of those. I haven’t done any optimization at this point, just threw it altogether, used some baseline settings from “Sloth Tech” and kicked off SWAR’s plot manager.
Check out Sloth Tech TV on YouTube, he’s also a user here but he’s got some awesome videos on doing exactly this. Hence were I got the idea and just ran with it.
Thank you for your reply! 
I’ve made a video on the performance diff between the 2 SAS drive running RAID 0 at 15k RPM and a Samsung 980 PRO 2TB.
Although the test it short you can see some " real life" performance in there
You do NOT want to plot on a “spinner” drive. Trust me…
I even wince at “SATA SSD” as a Plotter.
there is absolutely nothing wrong with either of those options
1 Like
Have you tried SAS drives? I’ve got a few large plotters running all NVME and have since setup some SAS spinning 300GB 10k drives. The drives were $15 each and with two in RAID 0 aren’t too far off what the Samsung 980 Pro’s will do. The biggest downfall is not being able to do anything in parallel on the spinning drives. Overall though they work pretty dang good, especially at the price and longevity standpoint!! I get over 20 plots a day with 16x SAS drives (8x RAID 0 sets) that cost less than $300 total investment. I haven’t tried running them individually yet to see on timings but may be able to get over 30 if they perform decent without RAID. (just haven’t had time to test it)
Best part (or worst part since I already spent the $$$$) is I could build a dozen of these SAS plotters for what one of my large NVME plotters cost!! Then not have to worry about replacing NVME drives when they burn out lol… If I did it all over again I wouldn’t plot on a single NVME drive myself…
I understand it works but most people want to pump out plots as fast as possible.
You’re are correct only if you don’t care how long the plots take to make.
I’m doing 5 hour 36 min plots on spinning drives on secondary plotters. Most people don’t pump out plots that fast on nvme doing parallel plots, so with good drives and many jobs, IO isn’t a bottleneck AT ALL. You just have shit drives.
What’s the sustained write speed of those drives? Mine have about 260MBps