IBM branded STec (s840?) eMLC 400GB SAS SSDs $40/ea shipped

I found these this morning but can't find references to the part numbers to gather more information:

IBM 400GB SSD 2.5 IBM00-02054-MI5BBCTU PN 9970678 in Tray | eBay

These are STec S840 series (S840's I'm going to assume, the gen2 S842 is a 2013 part and these were available starting in 2011) eMLC with a rated endurance of 7.3PB for the 400GB size. They also made a "write intensive" (as if 7.3PB isn't write intensive enough) drive that's the same 512GB sized drive underprovisioned to 300GB for even more write endurance.

I ordered a batch of these out of curiosity, wear is like ~225TBW-440TBW over 3.5 years of a rated 7.3PB endurance. One bum drive out of 6, the only drive of the batch with a 2011 mfgr date the others are all 2013 parts. All drives had ~3-3.5Yrs run time, 3 with ~220TBW, 2 with ~440TBW, one (bad) with 2TBW that chucked out 1k Grown Defects before I interrupted the badblocks run.

Performance is alright, but not great given power consumption. They're around 25% slower than the Samsung 850 Pro's I had spare to run comparisons.

FWIW these do come formatted to 528 byte sector size, though the drive controller supports 512,520 and 528b sectors. I had a crack at reformatting using sg_format and failed but had success with ahouston/setblocksize

 

Are drivesupply & goharddrive related? No first hand experience but, I heard of questionable practices from goharddrive on the forum.

 

I think this is pre-HGST acquisition which normally STEC drives are very very high power usage, and mediocre performance.

This drive is a toss-up unless we can x-ref with STEC part, which I tried and couldn't :/ hard to read though too.

 

Its an STEC z161zf2e as one can see when squinting propertly
sTec Z16IZF2E-100UCU 100GB SFF SAS SSD

O/C not the 100GB version i linked, thats just for reference of the class of the drive

 

Well in that case https://www.starline.de/fileadmin/images/produkte/stec/STEC-Enterprise-SSD-datasheet.pdf

 

Def. not something I'll be buying.

 

I think that one is too old, its from 2010

 

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EDIT: My old eyes couldn't squint fast enough...

Could it be this Z16IZF2E-400UCV

a couple of sites specify:

Read speed 500 MB/s
Write speed 300 MB/s
Memory type MLC
Data transfer rate 6 Gbit/s
Random read (4KB) 50000 IOPS
Random write (4KB) 15000 IOPS
SSD capacity 400 GB

 

I picked up a few, I'm willing to gamble at $0.10/GB

I'll post details when they arrive.

 

View topic - IBM branded "Locked" 400GB SSD

 

Maybe a solution - 400GB IBM SSD (98Y4042) on standard desktop PC
-> SCSI toolbox

 

Sorry if this is a bit off topic, I was wondering if anyone can help me understand what's going on here:

IBM 98Y4524 Flash Drive SSD SED SATA 400gb DS8870 | eBay

Is this just a SATA drive with some kind of adapter inline or is there something proprietary happening here? Shipping kind of ruins the appeal of these as a "deal" drive but I'm curious what this assembly is.

 

I think you want to look at this thread

 

That's a Sandisk CloudSpeed 1000. It's a standard SATA drive (though 1.8", so different connector than 2.5" or 3.5"). Looks like you may need 3.3V for it too, which isn't the most common.

 

It also looks like a dual port 1.8 connector... So maybe the interposer is converting sata to dual port sas?

 

Few years ago I did get a bunch of them (IBM 98Y4524) and never used them they still are stored somewhere safely for "future" use

Here is what I remember:

• require 3.3V power so you cannot use standard disk drive cable
• came formatted as 520, but can be easily reformatted to 512
• they get very hot quickly
• performance was reasonable (don't remember numbers)

 

Thanks everyone

 

As far as I know they are not related, what issues have you seen from goharddrive?

 

They erase SMART data on their hard drives so it's hard to gauge remaining lifetime and/or previous usage.