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Great OP! Exciting things are coming in the SSD space what with NVMe on the cusp of really busting loose and the xpoint saga unfolding. Some new absolute beast drives coming out with the Samsung PM1725 and drives based on the Microsemi 2016/2032 controllers. Also NVMe over fabric is going to be a thing so there will be NVMe over ethernet, fibre channel, whatever. Imagine having a NAS box that has NVMe devices that is connected via 10GbE cat6 and fast as hell. Also there is wild poo poo like this to compete with xpoint, hopefully: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/fujitsu-carbon-nanotube-memory-nram,32603.html Hope it's not total BS 
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Sep 1, 2016 06:23
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xPanda posted:Are people really certain that the U.2 connector won't take off? I know they're rare at the moment but so is NVMe itself. The same PCIe lane limitations apply equally to both, but the "being able to space stuff out" factor seems like a bonus. U.2 is definitely taking off with enterprise, and you can even get drives like the intel 750 in that form factor. It includes a cable in the box, I'm sure motherboards will show up with headers. There are JBOF (just a bunch of flash) enclosures available now and guys like google and facebook are creating their own with things like open compute project. Just a matter of time before they start putting the headers (they can use the SAS mini HD) on server class and then prosumer motherboards imo.
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Sep 1, 2016 15:38
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With the most recent Skylake PCHs (apart from the H110) they can have quite a few PCIe gen3 links, which is usually what the onboard m.2 socket is connected to. Older chipsets (H87, H/Z97) had more limited (8) gen2 only links. So pretty much any Skylake m.2 socket will be setup to work with m.2 NVMe drives. Some motherboards share the connectors with SATA Express links to the chipset for those occasional weirdos who have SATA Express drives. But normal people will just plug in an m.2 nvme and it'll work great. Another thing you can do if you want the MAX POSSIBLE SPEED for your m.2 is to get an adapter board (like this) and plug it into one of the north bridge (aka CPU lane) slots. This will split the x16 that the graphics card uses into x8, x8 (unless you have a socket 2011 processor in which case the X99 chipset probably had the m.2 connected up to the cpu lanes anyway - marketing blurb for this is "ultra m.2"). But realistically running from the chipset will see almost no speed difference whatsoever. There is an extra hop in the path (CPU QPI -> chipset -> drive) vs (CPU PCIe -> drive) but it's unlikely to really make that big of a difference. In any case it's pretty hassle free connecting a m.2 nvme drive up to any current gen (skylake) system, and mostly hassle free on recent haswell/broadwell boards. Just make sure the bios supports boot from nvme on those. A quick perusal of the specs (check the manual from the website prior to buying) can usually clear up any confusion quickly. priznat fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Sep 15, 2016 |
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Sep 15, 2016 07:56
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Paul MaudDib posted:What do people think about refurbished enterprise-grade SSDs? Newegg has refurb Sandisk CloudSpeed Eco 960 GB for $157. Assuming it's not trashed beyond usability by years of being a database disk or a ZFS cache drive, I'm thinking that would make a really nice Steam disk or Postgres store to toy around with for development stuff at home. I was talking to a product marketing manager who specializes in "alliances" with other vendors and he was telling me a lot of the big drive vendors (samsung, seagate, etc) will "rent" out a large number of enterprise grade drives (like hundreds of HDD or SSD, including NVMe ones) to other companies for testing things like controllers, JBODs, JBOFs etc. Then they get them back and recondition them, which I'm really curious as to what that involves. The Cloudspeed Eco looks to be barely enterprise grade (0.6 DWPD over 5 years with a 3 year warranty? blah) so yeah I wouldn't bother with it.
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Sep 17, 2016 05:19
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In the case of the true enterprise grade NVMe drives they usually have separate PCBs with one having the controller/DRAM and the other being flash.. So perhaps they just swap out the flash one? IDK. But on that Sandisk SATA one, who the hell knows. Could be they price it according to the life remaining based on the DWPD over 5 years.
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Sep 17, 2016 07:05
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Potato Salad posted:You should see the monstrosities on the DC enterprise cards. They get pretty flippin warm too even with the giant HS and expect something like 200LFM airflow going over them constantly. Most enterprise NVMe drives I've seen are in the 15-25W power consumption range which is quite a bit more than SAS/SATA (more like 8-10W). I should get a screenshot of the system I have with 10 NVRAM x8 drives running IOMeter over a x16 link via a switch, throughput hitting 14GB/sec. ~zoom~
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Sep 22, 2016 18:44
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HMS Boromir posted:So how has the 600p been shaking out? Reviews seem sparse and nobody's talking about it. Did anyone here buy one? I have one on a test setup at my work, it is no 950 (or one of the enterprise drive) but it is decent. I can run a benchmark on it if there is interest. Can't recall the numbers off the top of my head but they were the lowest of any gen3 nvme device I've tested, unsurprisingly.
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Sep 26, 2016 16:53
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I was at NVMe plugfest this week (a real thing) and can't go into too much details but there are a LOT of chinese brands bringing NVMe drives out in the near future. That was my biggest takeaway. Also M.2 is really getting traction in the enterprise space, surprising some folks.
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Oct 8, 2016 05:39
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U.2 isn't a failed interface, it is actually *the* interface for enterprise NVMe drives nowadays. SATA Express was dumb and no one is sad it is dead but the connector it spawned is fine and supports x4 gen3 no problem. U.2 used to be called SFF-8639 but Intel pushed to have it renamed "U.2" to get in line with M.2, although the add in card FF is still just "AIC". The drives themselves are 2.5" form factor and look like this:  NVMe JBOD/JBOFs will definitely be using this interface, like the Facebook Lightning JBOF and ones from Serial Cables (which you shouldn't buy because PLX sucks) The cables used are like Mini-SAS HD connectors (SFF-8644/8643) on one end to the drive on the other, like this, if not using a backplane. Mini-SAS HD is great because the 12Gbps cables have plenty of headroom for PCIe Gen3 and carry 4 rx/tx lane pairs. All that being said, I don't know if it would be a plus on the Asus motherboard because the pinouts of those U.2 connectors can vary a little with some containing the sideband signals and others not, and since asus doesn't include a 8643 to 8639 cable it might be a bit of a crapshoot. Plus the cables can be kinda pricey. Also, with the Optane I'm not surprised it is in smaller sizes (for now). It's really meant to be a replacement for other NVRAM solutions and not slower storage. Most of these use DDR attached to a battery or supercapacitor that gives enough time to dump it to flash if the main power goes out. With Optane they can ditch the battery pack and have pretty good speed, although it isn't quite the speed demon they were promising. I'm hoping MRAM starts coming in higher densities! And finally, anyone ever do benchmarking of multiple NVMe drives on windows server 2012 R2? I'm wondering what is the deal with it because I am seeing pretty different results run to run. The endpoints are DDR based and not flash so it isn't a wear levelling thing. I'm wondering if the nvme storage driver in that windows vintage is just kinda ehhh or something. Getting to be a real pain to establish benchmarks when things keep shifting around..
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Oct 15, 2016 05:28
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Ah - I was under the impression U.2 and SATA Express were one in the same. My mistake. It kind of came out of SATA Express, before it was a combination of either/or SATA and x2 PCIe which, god, we had one in the lab and it was loving terrible. Ran super hot, was a spinning disk, dropped connections at random.. It was a prototype, and the company making them dropped it (wisely). The only thing going for it was it was the only drive or endpoint that we knew of that supported SRIS (separate refclock independent SSC) so that was kind of interesting. Most separate refclock devices are non-SSC.
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Oct 15, 2016 05:34
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So the Samsung PM1725a is shipping now, in x4 U.2 and x8 HHHL form factors, the latter of which does 6400MB/s sequential reads  and over a million IOPS.For just over a buck per gig, which is really amazing. (At least the 1.6TB one anyway, $1670). I mean that seems like a hell of a lot to spend on storage these days but that is a HUGE drop from what intel P3700s were costing just a year ago.
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Oct 20, 2016 05:00
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That's for the DIMM replacement memory modules, it seems likely that xpoint pcie/nvme based interfaces will be out much sooner so q1 2017 still seems possible. Unless, of course, the performance is so sucky it makes it not worth the effort to release. According to the unh interoperability testing xpoint/optane got nvme certified earlier this year so they're pretty well along on that front. The DIMM replacement stuff is more tricky to get working seamlessly it seems.
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Oct 24, 2016 23:04
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Haha nice, we are ordering 10 256 850 evos for misc boot drives for lab servers, watchdogs for all! Finally went thru our stash of 840 pros..
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Nov 4, 2016 15:50
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havenwaters posted:Out of luck there. Seems to be 500GB+ SSDs only. Oh well.. we'll probably get a few 960s too going forward as well. Get to buy a bunch of nvme drives. Do the pm1725a qualify?
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Nov 4, 2016 16:04
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Has anyone seen x16 PCIe to quad m.2 cards other than the ones from Dell or HP? Seagate also has the XP7200 but that comes filled with drives which I don't really need. More interested in sourcing the bare card. Also I don't think the Seagate is officially out yet. Quad x4 bifurcation on the slot is no problem. Just nothing with a switch in between the edge and drives.
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Nov 8, 2016 01:33
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It has probably been discussed earlier but how are the WD SATA SSDs? X400 still the better buy on the budget side? Seeing some pretty nice $/GB sales on them and wondering if I see a black friday door crasher if it'd be worth it. Looking to get a 500GB-1TB for a games/steam drive.
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Nov 19, 2016 19:13
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drat that's a nice price. In  the X400 1TB can be had for $319 at NCIX but that is the pre Black Friday sale and the actual one might be better. The 850 Evo is $110 more (prices CAD). Still eyeing one for a steam/games disk.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:58
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The Iron Rose posted:The 850 EVO is better than the x400, but it's sure as hell not $110 better. That was my feeling as well.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:12
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Just got a 1TB 850 EVO for $350 CAD from ncix (~$260 US) so I'm pretty happy about that. Steam/games drive!
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Nov 25, 2016 00:55
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The M.2 socket is pretty janky for widespread consumer adoption imo. It's fairly fine pitched and delicate, and having to use a screw on most (with the correct standoff height at the correct standoff location) is a bit much compared to plugging in a sata cable or even plugging in a pcie card. It'd be nice if more boards have proper u.2 support and if u.2 drives start coming in thinner profiles similar to most 2.5" sata ssds. And that they don't get hotter than the frickin sun. I think then we'll see even more mainstreaming of nvme drives. I think it'll start pretty quickly!
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Nov 28, 2016 05:01
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BIG HEADLINE posted:"Sorry, Mario...the performance you were expecting is only available in *newer* castles!" Are they off the chipset usually as well? Gen 2 only to boot!
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Nov 28, 2016 05:55
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Also if it is an AIC (add in card) form factor often it has a half height bracket installed but they do usually come with a full height bracket too. Hopefully u.2 2.5" drives become more mainstream because then it's pretty much just like plugging in a SATA drive. Actually easier because there is only one cable to plug in that contains the power too.
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Dec 12, 2016 19:38
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Most stuff nowadays doesn't care if it is installed on c: or somewhere else so just adding another drive isn't much of a hassle. I put my new 1TB into use as a games drive, I like to keep my boot/os/apps on one and games on another. Then the boot/os gets the faster stuff first (next upgrade I will migrate to nvme) and I don't need to move around game stuff (which is really fast enough on sata III ssd for me)
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Dec 17, 2016 21:52
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We had an Intel P3700 400GB HHHL card just clicked over to read only mode, need to use the utility to see how much was written to it. They are rated to 7.3PBW so I don't know how we killed it that bad.
priznat fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Dec 26, 2016 |
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Dec 26, 2016 23:00
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Raid 0 m.2 pcie of course  But seriously the 960 will be the better bet for avoiding the raid hassles alone and will have better throughput performance to boot.
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Jan 10, 2017 01:08
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Potato Salad posted:Is...is that a bunch of m.2 pcie on u.2 sleds? Yup! Each are at x2, seagate xm1440s 960GB.
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Jan 12, 2017 17:10
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Have any mobo makers come up with clever no tool m.2 mounts? Seems like it should be doable.
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Jan 13, 2017 19:49
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:http://www.tomshardware.com/news/toshiba-wd-semiconductor-nand-spin-off,33448.html That's interesting stuff! Although Seagate is doing a fair amount of nvme flash stuff but mostly just enterprise. WD is positioned super well and having SanDisk, WD and HGST brands gives quite the range from low end consumer to enterprise. I am biased because my company sells controllers to wd/hgst, now hopefully they don't pull a samsung and start making their own.
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Jan 20, 2017 11:06
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It is surprising how hot nvme drives get, the external of most u.2 drives are one big heatsink and will be VERY hot to the touch if it is workin hard. I think the intel 3700 is something like 25W active (10W idle) which is a fair amount for something not very big. Once controllers move to smaller processes like how cpus do this will hopefully get better, but who knows once pcie gen4 comes around!
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Jan 30, 2017 21:26
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Anyone use smartctl in windows? Trying to figure out how to get it to tell me the health of nvme drives that aren't mounted to a drive letter. The documentation doesn't really help, it's very linux centric. Alternatively any other command line based tools to do that for windows?
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Feb 3, 2017 19:25
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Awesome, thanks!
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Feb 3, 2017 21:35
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Have Optane m.2 pricing/capacities been revealed? In all the promo shots from Intel I've seen it looks like 2280 length but promo shots aren't necessarily the real deal of course.
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Feb 4, 2017 18:01
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Teaming is supported in more sever oriented OSes like windows server 2012/2016 and probably linux too.
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Feb 4, 2017 18:07
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Dat 12.3 PBW tho
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Feb 9, 2017 18:15
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Trying to order a few (~20) enterprise nvme drives (p3700 in this case) and not having much luck. The suppliers are all blaming nand shortage. This suuuuucks because we have to get them this quarter for budget reasons. Anyone know of comparables that might be available or are we just hosed?
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Feb 24, 2017 23:00
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I yelled at the suppliers "FAKE NEWS!!" but it didn't help 
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Feb 24, 2017 23:17
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mmkay posted:Can I just grab an M.2 PCI-E SSD like a 600p or a 960 EVO, stick it in a adapter and plug it into my MB (ASUS Z87-C) and have it work without any other issues (chipset or whatever) as a data drive? I won't be needing to boot from it, but I have no idea how this poo poo works re PCI-E lanes. Should be fine, I recommend the Asus Hyper M.2 adapter, just because I have used a lot of then without issue. Just make sure the jumper is set to pcie instead of "hyper", I think that is their m.2 to u.2 cable adapter kit and they turn off the power to the m.2 device. https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboard-Accessory/HYPER_M2_X4_MINI_CARD/
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Mar 9, 2017 16:57
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Non volatile storage that is (almost) as fast as DRAM is the holy grail, so cache won't be lost with a power failure without having to use supercaps or batteries to back it up to nand. I wonder if the Xpoint is fast enough for raid controller memory and such. There's definitely a niche for it!
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Mar 19, 2017 21:39
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WhyteRyce posted:Yeah it presents some interesting sounding (but unproven or theoretical) use cases and I die a little inside when people post "yeah but a 960 pro is bigger and look at this rate sequential read speed who cares" For sure. There is gonna be a very sizeable market for even the pcie based ones and I think the enterprise folks are screaming for the DIMM based. I had thought they were originally going to so DIMMs first but they must have had some issues. It's an interesting step past traditional nand and it will get more interesting as more performance is gotten from it and more applications are found or details are worked out.
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Mar 19, 2017 22:28
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metallicaeg posted:That now brings the number of U.2 devices to two (2), both of which are absurdly expensive Intel products. Do you mean consumer ones? Because there are quite a few enterprise ones.. M.2 is the defacto consumer nvme standard right now, for better or worse.
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Apr 3, 2017 21:18
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