HP is getting close to releasing something that should appeal to those looking for serious NVMe performance on the cheap. It's the HP Z Turbo Drive Quad Pro.
I just learned about this and wanted to share. You get a full-height PCI x16 card into which you can stuff up to four NVMe x4 boards. They are claiming IOMeter 128kb sequential reads at 9,000MB/s for goodness sake. Four of those in a dual Xeon E5 server and you've got some really nice throughput. Retail pricing is supposed to start at $300 for the card with one 256GB NVMe board. I am thinking that you could buy one, throw out the small NVMe card, and add four larger NVMe boards of your own (maybe Samsung 950 pro?) to maximize throughput/$. Actually if their pricing holds, the retail of $900 for 1TB at 9,000MB/s is plenty good already, though the 1TB version likely has lower throughput than the 2TB version from their test results. We'll see.
HP Reveals New Z Turbo Drive Quad Pro | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews
HP Z Turbo Drive Quad Pro | HP® Official Site
UPDATE: See below. Chuntzu found that the card is BIOS locked to specific HP workstations.
I just learned about this and wanted to share. You get a full-height PCI x16 card into which you can stuff up to four NVMe x4 boards. They are claiming IOMeter 128kb sequential reads at 9,000MB/s for goodness sake. Four of those in a dual Xeon E5 server and you've got some really nice throughput. Retail pricing is supposed to start at $300 for the card with one 256GB NVMe board. I am thinking that you could buy one, throw out the small NVMe card, and add four larger NVMe boards of your own (maybe Samsung 950 pro?) to maximize throughput/$. Actually if their pricing holds, the retail of $900 for 1TB at 9,000MB/s is plenty good already, though the 1TB version likely has lower throughput than the 2TB version from their test results. We'll see.
HP Reveals New Z Turbo Drive Quad Pro | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews
HP Z Turbo Drive Quad Pro | HP® Official Site
UPDATE: See below. Chuntzu found that the card is BIOS locked to specific HP workstations.
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