NVMe Drives in Small Servers

We've been deploying workstations with motherboards that support VROC RAID 1 with Intel NVMe M.2 110 based SSDs with little to no issue. That's our preferred route.

For add-in cards we use Intel which is a customized LSI/Avago/Broadcom Tri-Mode controller. They have all of the necessary management built-in to maintain proper wear levels.

EDIT: We tend to stick with the Intel product as it's been our go-to for close to two decades now with a few issues here and there but that's it.

Since the opportunity is presenting itself I am going to have to bad-mouth Intel. I started out using their Consumer SSDs because they were supposed to be reliable and fast. They were fast but far, far from reliable. I have had about a 35% failure rate across all lines of their consumer drives. Not sure if I really want to take a chance on them anymore. Nothing but miss-steps for the last several years.

   That being said Philip what motherboards do you use that have two M.2 slots on them and do they make a serverboard that has two? It was Rindi that touted VROC RAID 1 with SSD drives.

   @Kimputer High Point has always had a name. I have stuck pretty much with Adaptec (whatever) for 30 years but High Point does look interesting. Then on the flip side NVMe might be overkill for a small entry level server.....

We don't deploy Intel consumer SSDs only their Datacenter or Pro-Sumer lines and up. We've seen a few firmware glitches over the years but for the most part we've had less than 1% fail rate across all of the desktops, workstations, servers, and clusters we've deployed. They've been very reliable for us.

The problems with SanDisk controllers for a number of years quite a while ago was what kept us under the Intel umbrella. Most SSD vendors had, at one time, used their controllers. A quick search should turn things up as far as problems go.

We have been deploying Gigabyte UD series boards for quite a number of years now and are quite happy with them. MSI would be a somewhat close second. In server solutions we've been deploying ASRock Rack.

EDIT: ASRock Rack is a relatively recent edition since Intel stopped making single socket boards beyond the Intel Xeon E3-12xx for the new E-2100 and E-2200 series processors.

The enterprise controllers expect you to use enterprise SSDs since those don't need TRIM support.

For the record Phillip the issues with Intel started with the Pro 2500 Series then proceeded to the 540 and 545 S. I wouldn't touch an Intel SSD at this point if my life depended on it.  Thanks All for the input.