UK 15.36TB Samsung PM1733 NVMe SSDs for £389.99, plus other bits from the same seller

[redeamon]

An idle of 12-15w is a bit insane for a 15.36TB drive @ gen3 speed...

That means you need considerable airflow (aka even more idle watts) to keep these drives operational. While low cost, electricity prices will add up.

Consider:

12w * 24 hrs * 31 days ~ 9kw

At .30c a kw (maybe more or less depends on taxes, fees, tiers), you're looking at $2.70 a month per drive or $32.4 a year per drive + the cost of removing heat (AC, spinning server fans higher, etc.).

Might not be worth it.

I have 15.36TB Gen4 drives that read/write at 6-7gb/sec (1.6M iops) that idle at 4-5w. i.e., https://netlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Netlist-NVMe-SSD-N1962-Product-Brief.pdf

 

[erm_what]

An idle of 12-15w is a bit insane for a 15.36TB drive @ gen3 speed...

That means you need considerable airflow (aka even more idle watts) to keep these drives operational. While low cost, electricity prices will add up.

Consider:

12w * 24 hrs * 31 days ~ 9kw

At .30c a kw (maybe more or less depends on taxes, fees, tiers), you're looking at $2.70 a month per drive or $32.4 a year per drive + the cost of removing heat (AC, spinning server fans higher, etc.).

Might not be worth it.

I have 15.36TB Gen4 drives that read/write at 6-7gb/sec (1.6M iops) that idle at 4-5w. i.e., https://netlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Netlist-NVMe-SSD-N1962-Product-Brief.pdf

If it idles that high then it's not ideal, but the difference between this price and the price of any other 15.36TB drive will pay for the electricity for a good few years. I'll see what the power consumption is when I get mine and go from there.

I'm planning on using one as a game drive (so not on all the time) and the others will be in a server as VM/container root drives.

It'll be winter soon and some extra heat won't be a problem.

Gen 3 is fine. Especially as they'll be in an array. I don't have the CPU or network to max out even a small NVMe array of these, especially with parity calculations and encryption.

 

[OP_Reinfold]

@ycp

They need their sector size changing before being usable on a Windows platform.

@erm_what

You should be fine in your use-case. The idle power isn't fixed in these like it is in the retail/OEM, it tends to climb up and down all the time. I measured directly from the molex using a current analyser for the readings. Whereas the retail version hits around 6-8 watts, the odd 6 watt bottom peak and a constant 8 watt peak, but the retail drive was running standalone and not in an array.

If you are going to run the array with parity, you are going to have a hefty power and heat load with these drives because they do not control their power consumption as logarithmic as the retail counterparts, also at max load they run closer to 30 watts. I have a gut feeling that the EMC controller controls the drives via some native communication protocol, and the drives themselves are lacking some of the 'standard' automatic logic one expects from typical NVME drives for throttling/power-management etc.

Out of the 16 drives I purchased, one failed, not sure why, they are only being used for warm-storage and the loud cooling has been keeping the drives at around 35 degrees centigrade.

Without more information, my presumption/guess is that these drives are rejected by the qualification process at DellEMC (where as I understand it, large SAN products costing in excess of a hundred grand are often tested for numerous hours before being shipped out to clients), and have effectively ended up in the hands of resellers/recyclers.

 

[dominicuk]

I bought one, added 10 watts to my nas on idle and does get very hot. It had media errors too. Probably are rejects.

 

[dominicuk]

I cant afford a nice 7450 pro, that would be the perfect energy efficient drive, so this will keep me going for now till the 7450s come down, already are, missed out on a few going for 600.
My only concern with this one is resale value will tank in comparison to the normal dell ones since used ssd prices are coming down steeply.

 

[VMman]

I got a message to say the managers are discussing it. I wouldn't expect an answer today/over the weekend though as they seem to work normal 9-5 hours.

The drives I bought were shipped today and should be here by Monday. I'll try to check SMART stats etc and post them up when I receive them.

Did your order arrive?

 

[erm_what]

Did your order arrive?

It did. I can't post full SMART data, but the drives all have less than 30 hours use, less than 80GB written, and seem pristine. There are no worrying stats I could see.

I successfully altered the sector size to 4k on one in nvme-cli (took 10s as it doesn't need to overwrite like SAS hard drives do) and it works in Windows and Linux just fine after that. I formatted it in both ext4 then NTFS and it worked fine. After the change it even works on the £30 USB->U.2 adapter I got on Amazon.

Bad news is that the firmware does not have power saving, as the seller and others have said, so it does run pretty hot. That said, with a slow fan on one side of it it idles at 45-50C in a 27C ambient room. It's set to run at up to 25W, but I don't think it's running at that ceiling, I think that just means it's not limited.

The quick read/write tests I ran showed the drive reading and writing at about 3200MB/s with 4k sectors, which is using the full Gen 3 bandwidth. I don't have a Gen 4 machine to check if it's limited that way, but probably assume it is. It was slower with 520b sectors at around 2500MB/s.

It doesn't show up in any of the Samsung tools (one did, but showed it as 3GB and with corrupt fields), so you can't flash the firmware that way, or use it to enable power saving. I've not tried flashing stock Samsung firmware with nvme-cli, but I'd expect it to fail the vendor check. Although, the ones I got are 2 firmware revisions newer than the one on the sticker, which can be seen in nvme-cli which has 3 firmwares in 3 slots on the drives. That might mean that SR-IOV works, but I don't have the means to check right now.

I may have found a newer Dell/EMC firmware for them, which may pass the vendor check, but I've not tried flashing it due to being ill and not wanting to accidentally trash a £400 drive.

 

[Psycho_Robotico]

Did anyone here get a reply concerning shipping outside the UK, particularly to the EU?

 

[NablaSquaredG]

Did anyone here get a reply concerning shipping outside the UK, particularly to the EU?

Yes

Hi,

These drives will work well in a EMC Dell PowerMax SAN Server environment, but EMC firmware will cause restrictions in other environments.

- Firmware NOT upgradeable/crossflashable to retail or standard OEM firmware.
- Does not work in Windows. Require advanced configuration in Linux before use in Windows environments, do not fully support standard NVME features such as namespaces and energy/speed management.
- Speed limited to NVME gen 3.
- High power draw, high heat. Drive does not idle down to low power outside of EMC SAN servers. Generous cooling with forced air is required to prevent overheating.

Are you still interested in these drives?

Regards,
Ollie
Eco-PC

 

[erm_what]

There's an extra 10% off now using COLLECT10

 

[Mihail]

There's an extra 10% off now using COLLECT10

yep £359.99 using the code plus 300 nectar points and some cashback, will need tinkering some cooling before there is a solution for idle/powerdown features

 

[erm_what]

You may still be able to get the £10 discount per drive by mentioning my name too, but I've not confirmed.

 

[Mihail]

You may still be able to get the £10 discount per drive by mentioning my name too, but I've not confirmed.

bought one yesterday guess too late now will see if i will be able to use this with no giant issues may order another one, maybe one day we can get around that EMC firmware but not very optimistic on this

 

[erm_what]

bought one yesterday guess too late now will see if i will be able to use this with no giant issues may order another one, maybe one day we can get around that EMC firmware but not very optimistic on this

It's worth a shot. They may give you a refund. Also, if enough people say they bought because of this post then I get some free stuff too.

 

[efschu3]

Anyone want to share some ATTO/CrystalDisk/fio results?

I mean, "slow Q1" is somehow unsatisfactory precise

 

[Mihail]

Anyone want to share some ATTO/CrystalDisk/fio results?

I mean, "slow Q1" is somehow unsatisfactory precise

there you go, there is just those data integrity errors bugging me a bit but hasn't moved since received the drive...

 

[Mihail]

how about these ones are retail should be working full pcie gen 4 speeds i guess

 

[ano]

1733's in general has ALOT OF SIGNALING ISSUES, guessings thats why theese are also forced to gen3, which isnt a bad idea with 1733s in general.

 

[Mihail]

1733's in general has ALOT OF SIGNALING ISSUES, guessings thats why theese are also forced to gen3, which isnt a bad idea with 1733s in general.

why would they disable the power saving feature though? is this worth paying £100 extra for the used retail unit from the other listing above, my offer was accepted

 

[alaricljs]

probably signalling issues getting worse from being in lower power modes.