4TB P4500 SSD - USD$375

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TonyArrr

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Sep 22, 2021
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4TB at US$375 per drive, comes out at just over 9 cents per Gig. It's a PCIe 3.1 TLC drive which Intel listed as being good for 1DWPD. Buyer accepts offers

I was considering it while working out exactly what sort of server I would be getting for my home but ended up excluding everything that could take more than 2 of these, so figure its safe for me to post it since no one will swoop in and nick them before I buy

Hope it's just what someone was looking for!

 

FlorianZ

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Dec 10, 2019
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Isn't the P4500 the Intel SSD that was essentially broken by design? Not that you'd run into any issues until you put a few of them into an array. Totally possible that I am confusing it with a different drive.
 

TonyArrr

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Sep 22, 2021
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Isn't the P4500 the Intel SSD that was essentially broken by design? Not that you'd run into any issues until you put a few of them into an array. Totally possible that I am confusing it with a different drive.
I never found any mentions of issues using them in arrays when I was weighing them against other options, though the few reviews I found of them did say they couldn’t coax the peak write performance out of them that Intel touted in their PR docs. They were all pretty happy to recommend them for write once read many workloads though, which is what I was looking for anyway.

Any idea exactly what the issues were, if it was these drives?
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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Did you watch the video to the end?

It's a specific issue with that drive & 2nd GEN AMD EPYC CPUs he said.
 

FlorianZ

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Dec 10, 2019
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Did you watch the video to the end?

It's a specific issue with that drive & 2nd GEN AMD EPYC CPUs he said.
Yeah, I watched it to the end. He also talked about the problems in another video / live show. If you want to investigate more, there is also content on either the Level1 forums or YouTube channel - I forget. I also forget which other platforms, if any, they investigated this on.

It's totally possible that this is limited to EPYC Rome, but that's a pretty big caveat emptor if you're selecting a platform for an NVMe array, which... you know, would benefit from a lot of PCIe lanes ;-)
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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Yeah, it does suck... but it would be an even more widely known and huge issue you'd read about all over if it was common in NVME arrays on every CPU \ system.

I'm not sure if this affects other than 4TB but I have 12? or so of these in 2TB and never saw\had this issue on my Intel CPU systems.
I have another 8x 2TB of them here on my desk I'll test and see if any issues come up.

Any idea if this is a 4TB only thing or ALL p4500s ?
 

FlorianZ

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Dec 10, 2019
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Yeah, that's a good point! I am sure they sold a ton of those drives to enterprise clients, not "just" YouTube channels. In fact now that you mention it, I seem to remember Linus saying in an earlier video that he bought these P4500 drives as decommissioned Facebook equipment. They must have worked fine there, I guess.

I honestly don't know much about the issue, including what capacities are affected. But based on your questions I started reading up on it again, and I saw that Wendell posted an update to this thread saying that the issues seem to be resolved with platform and kernel updates from 2020/2021 (except Gigabyte platforms). And he also seems to suggest that EPYC Naples was affected, but it has been fixed there too: Fixing Slow NVMe Raid Performance on Epyc
 
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mirrormax

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Apr 10, 2020
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its a discontinued drive validated in 2017, and hes complaining that its not working in a pre production dev system from amd. standard clickbait trash, if it wasn't enterprise hardware it would be more reasonable. but getting 2nd hand discontinued drives and be mad it doesn't work in your development epyc rome system is beyond stupid

heres directly from the ex intel employee responsible for the p4500 drives on the linus video, pretty interesting to hear their side of the story.
 
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klui

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Feb 3, 2019
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I can understand Linus's perspective but one needs to take his videos in perspective. They are entertaining though.
 
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MountainDew

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Oct 19, 2015
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circling back to this... and I've googled this a bit - but the disk appears to be a 2.5" drive, but you need a u.2 connector? It's not SAS or SATA?
 

FlorianZ

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Dec 10, 2019
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circling back to this... and I've googled this a bit - but the disk appears to be a 2.5" drive, but you need a u.2 connector? It's not SAS or SATA?
Yes, those are NVMe drives so you'll need to somehow connect them to PCIe. U.2 is just a physical connector for carrying the PCIe signals. Depending on how your motherboard is set up, there are adapters from M.2, PCIe slots, Oculink, etc. Tri-mode HBAs (e.g. 9400-16i) can also connect to NVMe drives directly. Some of these options are more expensive than others.

In general, U.2 drives are more expensive to connect and difficult to scale out compared to say SAS3 SSDs. But they are much faster, too.