Recent content by felmyst

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    Advice needed for buying old servers

    I'm looking mostly at 1U servers because I live in Belarus and shipping 2U systems is extremely expensive for me. Shipping for 1U Dell r610 will cost me about 300-400 $, r710 will be almost 500$/server. Add cost of the server and I'm broke.
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    Advice needed for buying old servers

    I need some real physical server hardware for a home lab. It'll run WS2016 + Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct, so I need: some IPMI-based remote management for SC VMM bare metal deployment (need to be able to mount ISO, power on/off and remote console) as much horsepower as possible for as...
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    great S2D deployment Guide

    This is a really great guide. They've got everything covered.
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    Dirt Cheap 40Gb infiniband networking?

    MELLANOX CONNECT X-2 QDR 40G IB NETWORKING ADAPTER MHRH2A-XSR That's really cheap, if not counterfeit.
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    HGST HUSML4040ASS600 - 400GB SAS - $160

    BTW, the same seller has a LOT of Quanta lb6m for 370$. Worth a separate thread I think.
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    HGST HUSML4040ASS600 - 400GB SAS - $160

    Bought 4 with 3PAR caddies and 520b bsize several months ago. Seems like these are the same drives, but reformatted. They're nice. Smart data: husml - Pastebin.com
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    How to reformat HDD & SSD to 512B Sector Size

    That's because it should be called "block size" and not "sector size". Sectors are created when HDD is manufactured, blocks are defined by controller. Many "enterprise" drives come with an option to enable T10 Data Integrity Field which makes them 520b block size. This thread explains how to...
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    Windows Server 2012 R2 reporting all hard drives as healthy, HDD Sentinel Pro 4.71 does not agree?

    This is technology, not magic. Storage Spaces report drive health bad when the drive has already died or is giving constant high latency and/or i/o errors -> actively dying. Same for event logs: you should monitor them for disk block and i/o errors but they serve the same purpose: to let you...
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    Super Cheap Hitachi UltraStar C10k600 450GB 2.5" TCG Encryption Hard Drives

    As I've already mentioned, mine 12 were already 512b formatted. But they're pulled from NetApp filer, so they definitely were either 520b or 512b with T10 PI. Or both. You can check yours using sg_readcap: PS C:\Users\administrator\Downloads\sg3_utils-1.42_mw64exe> .\sg_readcap.exe -l pd10 Read...
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    How to reformat HDD & SSD to 512B Sector Size

    You can also do the same from Windows. Just download pre-compiled Windows binaries from The sg3_utils package Notice: you'll need recent versions (2012 and higher I believe) for it to work. The only difference from Linux version is drive naming: instead of /dev/sdX you'll have PD# (stands for...
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    Super Cheap Hitachi UltraStar C10k600 450GB 2.5" TCG Encryption Hard Drives

    Windows doesn't support 520b blocks and enabling type 2 protection (T10 data integrity) may lead you to a lot of CRC/ i/o errors. Linux is indifferent to T10 data integrity but doesn't like 520b sectors AFAIK. So you'll definitely need to reformat them to 512b and likely need to also disable T10...
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    Super Cheap Hitachi UltraStar C10k600 450GB 2.5" TCG Encryption Hard Drives

    Here's complete datasheet for these drives: https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/USC10K600_Spec_Enc_V3.0.pdf According to this document (18.4 for basic info about FORMAT UNIT command implementation and 18.4.1 for acceptable parameters), we need to format them to 512 b size with...
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    Super Cheap Hitachi UltraStar C10k600 450GB 2.5" TCG Encryption Hard Drives

    My 12 arrived today. AT LAST. Still waiting for 12 more. Mail brokers in USA can't believe that they're not for resale and refuse to send them. Disks arrived in nice foam package. It's interesting that they're already 512 byte block size.
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    Super Cheap Hitachi UltraStar C10k600 450GB 2.5" TCG Encryption Hard Drives

    Just used a spare paypal account and everything worked. Ordered 24, waiting for their arrival.
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    Supermicro X9SCL-F hangs on loading option rom

    We already contacted Supermicro support and got nic eeproms, bios and ipmi firmwares and detailed instructions how to flash them. That didn't worked. Supermicro support contacted their bios engineers and they suggested sending them our system for further investigation. Sadly, we cannot afford...