Intel DC P3520 SSDPE2MX012T7 1.2TB PCIe 3.0 NVME U.2 SSD Warranty 2022 $99.95

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BeTeP

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You can get an adapter with a resistor to provide 3.3V as well: OKGEAR GC8ATAL 8 in. molex 4pin male to 15pin SATA power cable - Newegg.com
Read the review These adapters will kill your drive

Also I do not think they used a resistor. If they did - it was a bad design. A resistor can not provide the required constant voltage drop for the unknown load. My guess is that they just used a couple of zener diodes - still inexpensive but much more consistent. But since it is prone to melting - it does not really matter.
 
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AndrewX192

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I ended up buying a couple of the Intel M.2 to U.2 adapters to see if I can get these drives to work in another system, while I evaluate other options from WD (HGST) and Samsung. Intel is shutting down their store in 2 days, so if anyone else wants in on those cables you probably need to act now.
 
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Samir

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Read the review These adapters will kill your drive

Also I do not think they used a resistor. If they did - it was a bad design. A resistor can not provide the required constant voltage drop for the unknown load. My guess is that they just used a couple of zener diodes - still inexpensive but much more consistent. But since it is prone to melting - it does not really matter.
I guess that OKGEAR brand isn't so okay? :eek:
 

Rain

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May 13, 2013
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You can get an adapter with a resistor to provide 3.3V as well: OKGEAR GC8ATAL 8 in. molex 4pin male to 15pin SATA power cable - Newegg.com
I agree with @BeTeP. They are probably be using a Zener diode since using only resistors wouldn't work at all. Zener diodes generally make for terrible voltage regulators when the load varies; they can work for powering small static loads or as a cheap voltage reference, but in an adapter like this I can't imagine it working too well. Making matters worse, again as @BeTeP alluded to, the likely failure mode of Zener diodes is to fail shorted. Even though OKGear appears to stepping down the 5v rail in this adapter, in the event of a diode failure, the series resistor alone won't keep the voltage below 3.3v and it will likely fry the drive.

Random OKGear story (unrelated to these particular adapters): Years ago I was building my first NAS in a Norco 4224. I bought OKGear Molex splitters to provide power to the six Norco backplanes. Fired the server up and noticed a "hot" smell. The drive I have in one of the hotswap bays wasn't showing. Tried a few more drives; nothing.

The OKGear Molex splitters were wired wrong and swapped the 12v and 5v rails. Every backplane was fried. The few brand new Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drives I plugged in prior to realizing the issue were fried as well. Hundreds of dollars in damage caused by cheap, simple Molex splitters.

After OKGear never replied to my emails (I wasn't rude or anything; I mainly wanted to report the issue and see if they'd cover any damages), I vowed to never purchase an OKGear product again.
 
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Samir

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I agree with @BeTeP. They are probably be using a Zener diode since using only resistors wouldn't work at all. Zener diodes generally make for terrible voltage regulators when the load varies; they can work for powering small static loads or as a cheap voltage reference, but in an adapter like this I can't imagine it working too well. Making matters worse, again as @BeTeP alluded to, the likely failure mode of Zener diodes is to fail shorted. Even though OKGear appears to stepping down the 5v rail in this adapter, in the event of a diode failure, the series resistor alone won't keep the voltage below 3.3v and it will likely fry the drive.

Random OKGear story (unrelated to these particular adapters): Years ago I was building my first NAS in a Norco 4224. I bought OKGear Molex splitters to provide power to the six Norco backplanes. Fired the server up and noticed a "hot" smell. The drive I have in one of the hotswap bays wasn't showing. Tried a few more drives; nothing.

The OKGear Molex splitters were wired wrong and swapped the 12v and 5v rails. Every backplane was fried. The few brand new Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drives I plugged in prior to realizing the issue were fried as well. Hundreds of dollars in damage caused by cheap, simple Molex splitters.

After OKGear never replied to my emails (I wasn't rude or anything; I mainly wanted to report the issue and see if they'd cover any damages), I vowed to never purchase an OKGear product again.
Classic reason why I try and stay away from CCC (Cheap Chinese Crap).
 
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JoshDi

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Jun 13, 2019
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How's that Unicaca card working out? I chuckled at the name, 'caca' is fairly universal in romance languages for poop. Not a sharp choice in naming.

I might pick one up, can you take HQ photos of the PCB? This is worth its own hard drive subforum thread BTW.
card is working great. Needed to set the PCIe port to x4x4x4x4 bifurcation to make it recognize both drives.
 
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AndrewX192

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I’m staring to doubt that the Intel DC P3520 actually requires 3.3v. Looking in the data sheet, it calls 3.3v for the u.2 form factor “auxiliary” for SMBUS, and not required.

DFD9419B-6766-471C-AEDE-C4B8ADDCAFA0.png
 
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JoshDi

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I’m staring to doubt that the Intel DC P3520 actually requires 3.3v. Looking in the data sheet, it calls 3.3v for the u.2 form factor “auxiliary” for SMBUS, and not required.

View attachment 12673
I used a IOCrest Mini SAS SFF-8643 to U.2 SFF-8639 +15 Pin SATA Power SSD Cable 1m with two of these drives without issue so I agree with you, they take standard sata power cables
 
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JoshDi

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Also, just to mention. These drives have a 1480 TBW lifetime rating.

The two drives I received from the seller had the following stats:
Drive 1:
Data Units Read: 1,206,949,148 [617 TB]
Data Units Written: 1,101,330,140 [563 TB]
Drive 2:
Data Units Read: 1,194,407,600 [611 TB]
Data Units Written: 1,087,168,727 [556 TB]

Basically, these drives are 41% used. Not bad, but not as good as I would have liked.

Speeds on these drives are great though. I am using them in a Ubuntu software RAID1 configuration for a Bcache cache device in front of my LSI-9285-8e (Two RAID6 Arrays with a CacheCade RAID10 in front of them). I am double cached, but may consider removing the CacheCade in the future to expand drives in my 24 bay Xyratex SP2424S 4U 24-bay device.
 

AndrewX192

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Ok, I finally figured out my issue. The gigabyte M.2 to to U.2 adapters I've been using only work in my PCIe expansion cards that provide a m.2 interface, not the SuperMicro Motherboard's M.2 interface (despite it working with other PCIe m.2 SSDs). No idea why that is the case, but I guess it's a limitation I'll just have to stay aware of.

These drives do NOT require 3.3v power, despite the label (it's optional, per my previous post), and the SuperMicro cables are fine. I guess I'll have to find another use for my m.2 slots, more lurking in the great deals forum :)

Also, regarding drive utilization, here's what I'm seeing on one of my drives:

Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Read: 20,817,969 [10.6 TB]
Data Units Written: 286,152,603 [146 TB]
Host Read Commands: 81,366,432
Host Write Commands: 1,116,407,839
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 282
Power On Hours: 1,125
Unsafe Shutdowns: 0
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
 
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JoshDi

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Ok, I finally figured out my issue. The gigabyte M.2 to to U.2 adapters I've been using only work in my PCIe expansion cards that provide a m.2 interface, not the SuperMicro Motherboard's M.2 interface (despite it working with other PCIe m.2 SSDs). No idea why that is the case, but I guess it's a limitation I'll just have to stay aware of.

These drives do NOT require 3.3v power, despite the label (it's optional, per my previous post), and the SuperMicro cables are fine. I guess I'll have to find another use for my m.2 slots, more lurking in the great deals forum :)

Also, regarding drive utilization, here's what I'm seeing on one of my drives:

Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Read: 20,817,969 [10.6 TB]
Data Units Written: 286,152,603 [146 TB]
Host Read Commands: 81,366,432
Host Write Commands: 1,116,407,839
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 282
Power On Hours: 1,125
Unsafe Shutdowns: 0
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Glad you got it working. Looks like you got one much newer than mine :(
 
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frogtech

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How's that Unicaca card working out? I chuckled at the name, 'caca' is fairly universal in romance languages for poop. Not a sharp choice in naming.

I might pick one up, can you take HQ photos of the PCB? This is worth its own hard drive subforum thread BTW.

Universal caca?
 
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JoshDi

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Universal caca?
Sorry, forgot to take pictures of the card but it looks exactly like the pictures online which I will post below. It works perfectly in my Supermicro X11-SPM-TF board in slot 6 with bifurcation set to x4x4x4x4. When bifurcation is set to Auto, only one U.2 drive shows up (as expected). The drives are setup as a RAID1 software raid on my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installation and operate at full write/read speeds that these drives report via Intel. I am quite happy with the card and would recommend it.

The card came with full and half height PCIe brackets and 1 SFF to U.2 cable (0.5m). The cable in the last picture is not the one that came with it since it looks like a 1M or 2M length cable.

I might be selling this card with two cables, if anyone is interested, since I might be switching to a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-4E4T-O Quad Port Oculink to take advantage of the 16x slot of my X11-SPM-TF and future proofing. I purchased it for $68.04‬ + shipping (I am based in NYC).

s-l1600.jpg s-l1600 (1).jpg s-l1600 (2).jpg s-l1600 (3).jpg s-l1600 (4).jpg s-l500.jpg
 
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AndrewX192

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I got the second drive to work, and noted that it also has fairly little utilization:

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 24 Celsius
Available Spare: 99%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Read: 21,767,796 [11.1 TB]
Data Units Written: 283,443,139 [145 TB]
Host Read Commands: 85,074,082
Host Write Commands: 1,105,799,209
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 269
Power On Hours: 1,124
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0


I never figured out my M.2 adapter to U.2 adapter didn't work in the SuperMicro X11SSW-F, but they do work in my X11SSL-F.
 
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JoshDi

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I got the second drive to work, and noted that it also has fairly little utilization:

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 24 Celsius
Available Spare: 99%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Read: 21,767,796 [11.1 TB]
Data Units Written: 283,443,139 [145 TB]
Host Read Commands: 85,074,082
Host Write Commands: 1,105,799,209
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 269
Power On Hours: 1,124
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0


I never figured out my M.2 adapter to U.2 adapter didn't work in the SuperMicro X11SSW-F, but they do work in my X11SSL-F.
still jealous that your drives are only 10% used versus the two I received from the same seller that are about 40-50% used
 
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Evan

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still jealous that your drives are only 10% used versus the two I received from the same seller that are about 40-50% used
there was a time when I would have stressed about that but in a personal sense would never use the remaining wear left so long as the price is good just ignore it.
 

JoshDi

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there was a time when I would have stressed about that but in a personal sense would never use the remaining wear left so long as the price is good just ignore it.
You are right - price was half of what current eBay prices are. I'm happy with the drive. Shawn is a nice guy too
 
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T_Minus

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I never figured out my M.2 adapter to U.2 adapter didn't work in the SuperMicro X11SSW-F, but they do work in my X11SSL-F.
I've found the Intel M2 to u2 adapter works in all systems I've tried it in.
On my MSI and other board like it only THEIR BRAND worked, or the Intel.
I posted about this before here, it was maybe 2 years ago or last summer I Forget now.. but I went through that too.

After I confirmed this relatively inexpensive (but limited to PCIe 2.0 speed) way to add multiple U.2 drives to my system - I am looking to pick up some more drives. I am thinking about getting this P3520 or maybe Samsung PM1725. Both sell at ~$100/Tb. Which one is a better (faster/more resillient/etc) drive? Any other 1-4Tb models to consider?
If you can get a PM1725 for $100\1TB that's a good deal to me.
The 1725 is a better drive by it just depends if that's the area of improvement YOUR work load needs.
The PM 1725 use lots of power, and are hot so plan for that too.
 
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