Microserver Gen8 and PCI/NVMe/SATA addons

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cyruspy

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Mar 26, 2016
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Hello,

I'm wondering if an HPE Microserver Gen8 could take PCI cards like the QM2-2S-220A or QM2-2P-244A.

The idea would be to add two small flash drives without losing the 4 3.5" slots, since they will be used for capacity (bigger mechanical disks)

Regards.
 

Bjorn Smith

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Sep 3, 2019
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r00t.dk
Hi,

I don't see why not - it is a standard PCI-e card - the only issue could be if the cards require pci-e bifurcation and the server does not support it.

It is certainly worth investigating - try checking the BIOS of the server if you can set up bifurcation on the pci-e slots, and if you can I cannot see any problems as such.

But do not expect to be able to boot from them, that requires a newer platform I think.

Edit:
I think it will be fine, some of the cards are just a SATA controller - which definately will work, the others have a pci-e switch on the card, which should also work.
 
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cyruspy

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Mar 26, 2016
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Went with the more cumbersome but supported path. P222 with power splitters and custom mounting brackets + SSD‍

Now I'm wondering if used 200GB enterprise SSD are better than brand new consumer 240GB SSD disks... use case would be cache for secondary/remote/low usage unRAID machine. Cost seems to be the same (around 30 us dollars)

Edit:

Driver: it seems the fan runs louder if the card is not a P222
 

Bjorn Smith

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Definitely used enterprise SSD - the consumer SSD will burn out too quick - and the enterprise will just been on going for years. Most consumer SSD's have max 300TB written total, where some of the enterprise SSD's have 1-you name it drive writes per day for the duration of their warranty - the specific model tells you more. But for caching always use enterprise disks - consumer ssd's are not built for constant writes.
 

cyruspy

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Mar 26, 2016
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Of course, its the way HP and other brand manufacturers force you to buy their overpriced equipment :)
Well, the P222 was only us$ 14. A single card with 2xNVMe cards would have meant less clutter.

Although the consumer-drive-as-cache probably would have had a bad result.

The way unRAID works, cache drives are actually "main active drives with eventual copy to HDD", not really a cache as seen in an actual storage system though.
 

cyruspy

Member
Mar 26, 2016
95
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Definitely used enterprise SSD - the consumer SSD will burn out too quick - and the enterprise will just been on going for years. Most consumer SSD's have max 300TB written total, where some of the enterprise SSD's have 1-you name it drive writes per day for the duration of their warranty - the specific model tells you more. But for caching always use enterprise disks - consumer ssd's are not built for constant writes.
Thanks, it seems I'll scale to 2x400GB S3700