@Aschenbrenner the Samsung 990 does not have Power Loss Protection. The PM9A3 do.

@ErikBussink @Aschenbrenner I would probably continue with the Optane if it has enough space.
Sure, there is a huge theoretical advantage for the Samsung, but in real life I'm not sure you will notice. And the 990 is a consumer drive that might get slower as it fills up.

@ErikBussink @Aschenbrenner
I can mention that I had a Optane P5800X for tempdb, it still had a couple of ms latency.
I changed job, so unfortunately I can't play with it anymore. 😪😪😪

@Aschenbrenner @fb I’m using Intel P4801X 100GB for the caching tier. Good enough for my lab.

@ErikBussink @fb Does the PLP availability make a difference in vSAN? I think that someone told me back in 2017 that vSAN doesn‘t give you the best possible performance when it detects that the caching tier has no PLP support. Am I right on this one?

@ErikBussink I don‘t want to bother you, but do you know here something? Thanks 🙏

@Aschenbrenner No i don’t.

@Aschenbrenner I’m asking this further and will get back to you if i have an answer.

@ErikBussink I've just read now about the new vSAN ESA, and learned that there is no difference between cache and capacity disks anymore. So, the question is now if the PLP-enabled SSD still makes sense in a Home Lab scenario with vSAN ESA? In addition, I can also meet the 25 GBit network requirement :-)

@Aschenbrenner are you using vSAN for normal storage or are you using FileServices or Stretched policies ?

@ErikBussink I'm using vSAN for storing my VMs - nothing more.

@ErikBussink Would it then work in my scenario?

@Aschenbrenner yes.

@ErikBussink Cool - thanks! My plan will be to use in each ESXi host (3x) a Dual M.2 PCIe SSD card with a 1 TB and a 2 TB Samsung M.2 NVMe (960 & 990).

@Aschenbrenner YMMW if you are going to mix different generations of SSD, your perf will be all over the place.
Remember that vSAN ESA requires a vSAN Readnode on the VMware HCL.
There is also a memory footprint that will be consumed for vSAN. hope you have enough RAM.

@ErikBussink Of course everything is not on the HCL and gives you warnings during the installation/configuration, but who cares about it in a Home Lab scenario?

@Aschenbrenner While not on an HCL, you do care to have a stable environment that is predictable and highly available.
A Home Lab can run important workloads for you, for training and for demos.
One point you mention, is the mixing of Samsung 960 and 990 Pro. There is a lot of perf difference between those SSDs. I would not do that in my lab.

@ErikBussink So you would go just with one version - like the 960? Thanks for the input!