Two PCIe SSDs (3.2TB & 1.6TB)

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TubaMT

Member
Jul 26, 2014
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Finally plugged my F320 in and similar to you guys getting great speeds with the stock firmware it came with. Will upgrade the firmware when I get the chance. It runs in the high 30's and low 40's for me but I do have a lot of ventilation in the case. It had low hours and writes as well:

1703 hours (71 days)
100% Health
45 TB Lifetime Writes
 
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cooldude919

New Member
Sep 8, 2016
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Got the 1.6tb going today, super low read/write, but a lot of power on hours, ~5 years it looks like.

1604369864533.png
 

Bradford

Active Member
May 27, 2016
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I'm sad I missed this. Is this a good OS drive? I see that another drive I'm considering (iodrive2) is so old it's not good for booting.
 
Apr 16, 2018
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I'm sad I missed this. Is this a good OS drive? I see that another drive I'm considering (iodrive2) is so old it's not good for booting.
It should work fine as a boot drive if the board supports booting from nvme devices(most that are about 2016 and newer will(and some older boards with bios updates/mods)
 
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gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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Poland
I'm sad I missed this. Is this a good OS drive? I see that another drive I'm considering (iodrive2) is so old it's not good for booting.
Why would you want to use an ioDrive2 as a boot drive? Can you explain, please. Thanks in advance.
It should work fine as a boot drive if the board supports booting from NVMe devices (most that are about 2016 and newer will(and some older boards with bios updates/mods)
I used Clover-EFI in the past to boot NVMe drives even with motherboards not supporting booting from these drives. Just worked.
 

thigobr

Member
Apr 29, 2020
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I am using the F320 as a boot drive on my Ryzen/Asrock Rack server and it works fine. UEFI recognizes it as a boot drive without any issues.
 

Bradford

Active Member
May 27, 2016
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Why would you want to use an ioDrive2 as a boot drive? Can you explain, please. Thanks in advance.

I used Clover-EFI in the past to boot NVMe drives even with motherboards not supporting booting from these drives. Just worked.
I'm pretty ignorant about pcie enterprise ssds, but high endurance, high speed, cheap. Why wouldn't I want to boot from it?
 

IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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I'm pretty ignorant about pcie enterprise ssds, but high endurance, high speed, cheap. Why wouldn't I want to boot from it?
There's nothing wrong with booting from it. It's just that many people use smaller/slower/cheaper drives as boot drives since speed/performance is not really important for server boot/OS drives . You'd then use the faster enterprise drives for their actual storage workloads. If you are going to use just one drive for all your storage then you're fine to boot from it.
 
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eduncan911

The New James Dean
Jul 27, 2015
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Yep, I'm rocking my 2x F320 3.2T with stock firmware on an ZFS raidz0 Threadripper 2 system w/128GB ECC 3200Mhz. Insane numbers. Though, I need to disable ZFS ARC and get some real numbers as the ARC typically holds around 50GB of data after about two weeks of power-on/suspend time.

I bought both for $210 ea, shipped. I also bought a couple of Intel Optane 900P/905P HHHL as well to be the ZIL cache layer. But I tell you, these F320s in raidz0 just kills it. I don't see a need for the Optane optimizations. EXCEPT for the new L2ARC persistence. That is very appealing to fill up the rest of the Optane 905P in the pre-cache state to survive between boots.

I want to flash the firmware at some point. Just haven't dug into the difference versions and benefits/fixes. Maybe there's a serious bug in the F320 stock firmware?
 

eduncan911

The New James Dean
Jul 27, 2015
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Where did you get it for that price? I'd like to buy two as well.
Just set an ebay price alert. I've had more luck with 3rd party ebay monitors than ebay themselves - especially to capture things faster just as they are listed.

Mine came from Australia. But I also have picked up a few on these forums for $220-ish. Set an alert because the low-cost items go fast.