Enterprise SSD "small deals"

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luckylinux

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2012
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Cruzader said:
Using 16x 3.84 rather than 4x 15.36 also comes with additional cost from cables/adapters to potentialy needing to replace your platform for more lanes.
Saving 15$/tb comes back to bite you if you are spending 18$/tb on a new platform and to connect them.
You can also be looking at 16x 18-25w vs 4x 16-20w
(Im usualy looking at a build for my lab with 2-3year runtime in mind)

But servers with E1.L bays is the one thing id really like to see drop in price on the used market for sure.
Sure i can connect them with a adapter to U.2 and just cable from there, but id like to slot them in a bay rather than some DIY mounting sideways behind a fan row.
(That is what ive been considering to stick 2 E1.L drives in each of my whitebox storage nodes)
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I think you forgot to mention a couple Things for your Comparison:
a. Risk Management: if 1 x 3.84TB breaks out of the 16, you lose 100 USD, if one 15.36TB breaks out of the 4, you lose 600 USD
b. Usable Capacity and of course you could Argue RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 for 16 (or 2 x RAIDZ2 of 8) vs Striped Mirror or RAIDZ2 of 15.36TB, you'd use 200-400 USD for Parity of the 3.84TB vs 600 USD for the 15.36 TB

Agree on Cables and Power Consumption, several smaller Drives also has Issues.

But it's not like 15.36 TB is the Perfect Solution everywhere.
 
M

Mithril

Active Member
Sep 13, 2019
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Write amplification. It's been a hot minute since I really dived into specifics, but as I recall few (if any modern) SSDs are actually 512b under the hood, and writing 512b still requires a larger free area (and erase pages are even larger, but thats a whole other discussion). IIRC even many "4k native" drives need 8k or 16k free blocks to write. If you tell the OS/file system the drive is 512b, it will sometimes issue multiple 512b writes that should have been contiguous as part of (or all of) a 4k block. This will not always be automatically fixed, its an "it depends". When it isn't a 4k write can turn into 8 4k writes. In order to "save space" the file system would ALSO need to use 512b sectors/clusters/blocks. A 1TB drive with 4k sectors (drive and file system) can store close to 250 million files. If you have even close to 100 million files in most file systems on a single drive you are having what is known as "a bad time". NTFS minimum is 4K, while EXT3/4 is "clever" and you can store more than one inode per physical disk sector already (depending on format options).


512b mode is for legacy compatibility, and generally comes with downsides to iops/performance (including increased CPU overhead).
 
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PnoT

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Mar 1, 2015
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My concerns were the write amplification, and after looking around quite a bit, I couldn't find anything stating that you can format these drives differently, unless I've missed it.

I'm going to check out some of the resources you've mentioned, but I don't plan on running any large databases or VMs on these drives, so in the end, it might not matter if there is a bit of amplification.
 
J

J--

Active Member
Aug 13, 2016
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Has anyone purchased from the white label listings from Serverpartsdeals?

I'd like to pick up 4 or so 3.84TB SAS drives and I'm pretty drive agnostic, other than trying to avoid the whole rigmarole of guessing if I'll need embark on an easter egg hunt to find firmware updates to avoid failure.
 
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zzz111

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Apr 3, 2025
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ca3y6 said:
More Lenovo OEM 2.5in 3.84 TB SATA 6Gb QLC ION $150 (or maybe it’s the same relisted, am on a plane can’t check)
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At least the exact same as his previous listing in this thread and a few on his profile. All the same pics. Different lot sizes tho. Sets in 3, 3, 5, 6 from what I saw

EasyRhino said:
the ebay listings says they take offers who know how low they go...
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Some of the listings I saw paid the list price. With those specs they're quite slow and have low endurance for enterprise drives. No mention of health
 
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luckylinux

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Mar 18, 2012
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Cruzader said:
Id expect the sun X7-2L to be a good starting point to DIY a full height build out of also.

If you are in the US they start round 200$ with free shipping like this one, 2 generations newer with 11 pci-e slots + 2x m.2 slots in the rear.
(i belive there is a dual m.2 flash riser option also, to get 4x m.2 slots rather than 2)
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What about BIOS Support ? Isn't Sun/Oracle locked down completely, maybe can only work with Sun/Oracle branded PCIe Devices, and Firmware Updates cannot be obtained at all without a very Expensive support Contract ?
 
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luckylinux

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ca3y6 said:
this one is either the deal of the century, or a mispricing, or a bad label:
10pcs SK 7.68TB HFS7T6GDUFEH-A430A VK007680KWWFQ hynix SSD HPK2 U.2 PCIE PE6011

the seller is a reputable chinese seller, this is advertised as 10x 7.68TB U.2 SSD (though a bit old) for $660, so $66 each. It is showing photos of what seems to be multiple boxes of 10 drives. However the quantity is 10 (so 10 boxes of 10, or does the seller meant to sell 10 one by one?), and the seller is also selling them individually for the same price (7.68TB SSD SK hynix PE6011 U2 PCIe VK007860KWWFQ HPK2 PE6011U2STD HFS7T6GDUFEH), so I think this seller clearly didn't mean this discount (and I almost never find great SSD deals from these reputable chinese sellers)

So I'd say a bit of a gamble. You may get the deal of the century (or at least of the year), or a cancelled order, or a bad surprise (only one drive instead of 10) with a seller you can't really return to.

So I decided not to bite myself, though you are welcome to prove me wrong and make me hate myself!
Click to expand...
When they say 10pcs I think they mean they have 10 pcs available. The Price is Per-Piece. VERY Confusing I know, but many Sellers do these write-ups.
 
R

rayko

New Member
Mar 11, 2024
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rayko said:
View attachment 45314

This one should arrive tomorrow.
Click to expand...
This might have been a typo when they listed it. These have been listed for $389.99

Item: 306467530183
WL OEM 7.68TB - 1 DWPD SAS 12Gb/s 2.5" Enterprise SSD
serverpartdeals (11389)
Item Condition
Very Good - Refurbished
Price US $199.99
See order details
eBay Money Back Guarantee
Get the item you ordered or your money back.



Code: 
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               SAMSUNG
Product:              PA33N7T6 EMC7680
Revision:             EQHE
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        7,680,475,267,072 bytes [7.68 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Physical block size:  4096 bytes
LU is resource provisioned, LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Form Factor:          2.5 inches
Logical Unit id:      0x5002538a98839390
Serial number:        xxxxxxxxxx
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-4)
Local Time is:        Wed Sep  3 16:52:52 2025 EDT
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Percentage used endurance indicator: 0%
Current Drive Temperature:     41 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        70 C

Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 40608:40
Manufactured in week 34 of year 2018
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  42
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  0
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  0
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0        0         0         0          0     919498.609           0
write:         0        0         0         0          0     225044.051           0
verify:        0        0         0         0          0     428149.427           0

Non-medium error count:        4

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40534                 - [-   -    -]
# 2  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40532                 - [-   -    -]
# 3  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40530                 - [-   -    -]
# 4  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40528                 - [-   -    -]
# 5  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40526                 - [-   -    -]
# 6  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40524                 - [-   -    -]
# 7  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40521                 - [-   -    -]
# 8  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40519                 - [-   -    -]
# 9  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40517                 - [-   -    -]
#10  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40515                 - [-   -    -]
#11  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40513                 - [-   -    -]
#12  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40511                 - [-   -    -]
#13  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40509                 - [-   -    -]
#14  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40507                 - [-   -    -]
#15  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40504                 - [-   -    -]
#16  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40502                 - [-   -    -]
#17  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40500                 - [-   -    -]
#18  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40498                 - [-   -    -]
#19  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40496                 - [-   -    -]
#20  Reserved(3)       Completed                   -   40494                 - [-   -    -]

Long (extended) Self-test duration: 90 seconds [1.5 minutes]
 

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EasyRhino

Well-Known Member
Aug 6, 2019
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rayko said:
This might have been a typo when they listed it. These have been listed for $389.99

Item: 306467530183
WL OEM 7.68TB - 1 DWPD SAS 12Gb/s 2.5" Enterprise SSD
serverpartdeals (11389)
Item Condition
Very Good - Refurbished
Price US $199.99
Click to expand...
You madlad that was a great deal! I mean, it's a very old model drive, but amazing price per TB.
 
L

luckylinux

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2012
1,823
607
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ca3y6 said:
10pcs normally means it's a lot of 10. I don't think these sellers would make that mistake because of bad english. My money is on mispricing (and therefore if you ask, they will likely correct it, and the remote chance they may honour their original price goes to zero).
Click to expand...
I agree. But I also see from Time to Time similar listings from e.g. Germany where it's written "4 pcs" in the Title, there is a big Bigture with 4 Pieces and the whole Label / Serial Number etc, and then there is "4 Available" that you can Buy.

You can do 2 + 2 and draw your Conclusions from that ;) .

If it's a batch sometimes (but unfortunately NOT always) the Quantity indicates e.g. "4 Lots Available (4 Items per Lot)" - i.e. 16 Items in Total.

I might have gotten the exact Wording wrong, so apologizes for that, but you know what I mean.
 
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