The point is, is there a way to make it work on windows? The seller is reporting it does not work on windows (device cannot start error) and I would expect it to work only in its own IBM system, but the seller also reports that it does work on Linux and even on Mac OS. Ill share the screenshots below:
re: windows- As far as I know, no. Maybe with some hacking of the windows nvme driver it's possible but that's beyond my ability.
Does it 'work' in linux/mac, yes you can boot up with it, format it (sorta), etc., but is it usable? not really.
Why is not usable? As you can see in the screenshots the drive presents itself as a 40TB drive but the drive is a 19.2TB drive. What happens when you write more than 19.2TB of incompressible data? You corrupt the filesystem and get massive hardware errors from both the drive and filesystem. These drives are designed to have continuous communication between the o/s and firmware of the drive. You may think that by restricting the namespace or filesystem size you might be able to skirt around the issue but my partner found it still corrupts data.
See page 19.
As far as I know, there's no way to disable the hardware compression/encryption and turn the drive into a normal nvme device. Most standard nvme commands/features don't work. Namespace? Only 1 allowed. Power level settings? Don't work.
So you're stuck with a drive that has poor i/o (it's really bad since it's trying to compress everything and is designed to run in parallel with other drives), has poor throughput (1gb/s if you're lucky) that sub performs a typical SAS3 drive but uses a NVMe connector.
We had one a while back and that's what my partner concluded. Maybe I'll grab one and play around with it, but in my opinion it's over priced for what it is- a $900 headache mystery box that barely outperforms 2x 10tb spinners with questionable reliability.
On the positive side- you can make toast on these