Sun Oracle F80 800GB PCIe Flash Accelerator 7069200 LSI WarpDrive 6203 $195 + FS

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RobertFontaine

Active Member
Dec 17, 2015
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Winterpeg, Canuckistan
I'm still enjoying the bliss of removing some rust and putting my vms on a s3500... Will definitely be getting a short stack and maybe even a full helping. Still unsure whether to zfs, jbod, or even just stripe them for max performance and back them up nightly to rust.

The cards were designed and sold as SQL Server application speed ups so they will likely help with UC2 and I'm not quite as clear about configuration for UC1 although zfs and cache might be the answer.

I have 2 different use case where these might be helpful:

1. Work - multiple desktop vms running simultaneously for product testing.
2. Play - kaggle box -For data mining/machine learning this could be nice in those cases where my data has to be staged and disk read is the limiter to analyzing a model.

I'm not sure how Hyper-V and Windows Server play with this yet. I am still running Hyper-V on top of Windows 10 (metal) rather than running my desktop os as a VM from Within Windows 2012R2 or 2016TP# without a UI.
 

BackupProphet

Well-Known Member
Jul 2, 2014
1,083
640
113
Stavanger, Norway
olavgg.com
For data mining you get far with sequential read, that is the key sell point of Hadoop, optimized for sequential reads. It is completely useless for random read.

Machine Learning is always CPU/GPU bound. Even with spinning rust.

For several VM's you will benefit, especially Windows VM's.
 

RobertFontaine

Active Member
Dec 17, 2015
663
148
43
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Winterpeg, Canuckistan
Thanks...

I've seen a few datasets where the initial data is several terabytes in size. My xeon phis are 6gbs and the new video cards are 8gb. If I understand correctly... Chunking models and features into sets that fit into ram of gpus/coprocessors/processors is highly desirable (almost necessary) although I have read that there are covnet implementations that can span cards/processors.

So raw bandwidth numbers would be a better criteria for selecting a disk subsystem for feeding the beast rather than IOPS for UC1...

That said getting the ssd on the PCIe bus using NVME gets me out from behind the SATA bus and succeeds in this task better than SSD's on the SATA bus. Multiple cards on different PCIe channels could potentially scale 1:1 assuming adequate cpu power to run them but there are only so many PCIe channels and it becomes a choice of processing cards vs storage cards very quickly my x9-drg. I would have to trade up to something with a serious backplane and possibly 4P or more (unobtanium for my wallet)....

So clearly I should get 2... or 6 :)

Sun is claiming
 155K random IOPS (8K), 2.1 GB/sec throughput performance
vs
Fusion IO's
  • 1.5GB/s Read Bandwidth (64kB)
SATA is saturated around 5GB/s iirc.
 
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ColPanic

Member
Feb 14, 2016
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ATX
From what I've read, these appear as 4 separate drives since the firmware is running in IT mode. You'd have to software raid.
I have one and this in indeed the case. It shows up in Windows and esxi as an LSI 2008 HBA with 4 SSD drives. I wonder if some IR firmware can be flashed onto it?
 

katit

Member
Mar 18, 2015
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I am still running Hyper-V on top of Windows 10 (metal) rather than running my desktop os as a VM from Within Windows 2012R2 or 2016TP# without a UI.
Is Hyper-V under W10 any different from 2012R2? If I run on same box, do I get GPU/USB/etc pass-through?
 

NobleX13

Member
Oct 2, 2014
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While I wait for my full-height LSI bracket that I ordered from China I figured I should put this drive in one of my small form factor systems that accepts half-height cards. Windows 10 Pro recognized the card automatically but every time I try to set up a striped volume across all four drives the Disk Management MMC freezes and the format never completes. I even ran DDCLI.EXE and did a format but this did not help things.

Has anyone else ran into this? The only thing I can think of is that I might need to specify a specific sector size when formatting... I left it at "Default" when I attempted this last night.

I also tried to find a compatible firmware from Seagate's WarpDrive site. The 800GB firmware available there says "NAND type mismatch" when I attempt to flash it.
 

katit

Member
Mar 18, 2015
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I don't know. I have the trial 2012R2 but haven't commited yet.
Robert, what you "don't know"? Don't know if GPU/USB passed through or if you will keep 2012R2?

I'm trying to decide for my workstation if I can live with W10 virtualization or I need to go with VMWare Workstation.. I plan to work in VM
 

svt3391

Member
Feb 11, 2016
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I put 2 @ $158 and I think the seller wanted to sell all three at once. My time of offer was actually earlier than your 3.
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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Sorry about that, at the time of my offer, there were 6 other competing offer.
I was really surprise that he accepted my offer.
 

MystPhysX

New Member
Nov 6, 2014
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It's going up? People in the thread were getting it for 155-170USD so I assumed it was going down.
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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1,496
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Let me repeat myself one more time.
Love the IT mode, takes 30 seconds to insert the PCIe card , no fuss with SSD cabling , power plug , or mounting with screws.