New/Bulk Packaged Samsung 983 960GB (U.2) $85 @ eBay

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

simpleCactus

New Member
Nov 2, 2020
5
3
3
The 983DCT is rated for .8 DWPD over 5 years for ~1.4PBW.


edit: It was brought up that this is actually not the DCT variant. Warranty is instead 3 years at 1.3 DWPD, ~1.37PBW, with slightly different performance characteristics.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Markess and whbeers

Wasmachineman_NL

Wittgenstein the Supercomputer FTW!
Aug 7, 2019
1,871
617
113
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

A. located in the USA and B. U.2 :( If they were SM883's I'd buy five instantly!
 

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
1,146
761
113
Northern California
Link worked for me, but I also see it up to $95 + $11.23 shipping. I think that's a good price though, even at $95? Appears that they haven't been used, and the price is down where the low end consumer ~1TB SATA & m.2 NVMe are.
 

simpleCactus

New Member
Nov 2, 2020
5
3
3
how much the adapter will cost?
Depends on what you're doing: How many are you trying to connect? Does your motherboard support bifurcation? Do you have existing unused M.2 slots? Available PCIe x4/x8/x16 slots?

In some cases, a simple $12 U.2 to PCIe x4 adapter will work.
 

simpleCactus

New Member
Nov 2, 2020
5
3
3
Link worked for me, but I also see it up to $95 + $11.23 shipping. I think that's a good price though, even at $95? Appears that they haven't been used, and the price is down where the low end consumer ~1TB SATA & m.2 NVMe are.
I got 4 at the $85 price. If I can get them all lit up on my vacant x16 slot, this is going to be an excellent and cheap way to mess around with tiering in Storage Spaces.
 

chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
621
191
43
56
question that's always been in my mind about U.2 cables - why is it that U.2 drives seems to need to tap external SATA power? Does it exceed the power provided by the M.2 slot? I have 2 U.2 ports on my board but cables all seem to be $20-30 each
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
2,059
1,478
113
Yes, M.2 only provides 3.3V, with 2.5A at max. So, no 12V and not enough power overall.
 
  • Like
Reactions: chinesestunna

simpleCactus

New Member
Nov 2, 2020
5
3
3
question that's always been in my mind about U.2 cables - why is it that U.2 drives seems to need to tap external SATA power? Does it exceed the power provided by the M.2 slot? I have 2 U.2 ports on my board but cables all seem to be $20-30 each
It was developed as an enterprise technology. A backplane with power distribution is commonly used. In some scenarios, a mixture of storage types are hosted in an external enclosure connected via HD Mini-SAS cabling, all controlled by a single HBA.

I think the cables are expensive because extending a PCIe signal requires a much higher quality cable than say, SATA.

See: LSI/Avago/Broadcom 9400-16i/e
 
  • Like
Reactions: chinesestunna

chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
621
191
43
56
Yes, M.2 only provides 3.3V, with 2.5A at max. So, no 12V and not enough power overall.
It was developed as an enterprise technology. A backplane with power distribution is commonly used. In some scenarios, a mixture of storage types are hosted in an external enclosure connected via HD Mini-SAS cabling, all controlled by a single HBA.

I think the cables are expensive because extending a PCIe signal requires a much higher quality cable than say, SATA.

See: LSI/Avago/Broadcom 9400-16i/e
Thanks guys, I think another factor is economy of scale as U.2 is still "relatively" new compared to something like say SAS (with all the fan out cables) and most deployments are backplane based, therefore cables are probably very low demand therefore higher cost. I think my 2 u.2 ports onboard will probably go unused as the economics doesn't make sense ATM, unless U.2 drives become significantly cheaper than M.2 which I don't see happening anytime soon
 
  • Like
Reactions: Dreece

Dreece

Active Member
Jan 22, 2019
503
160
43
U.2 only makes sense when you 'need' very fast enterprise grade drives (with their associated reliability attributes as well as PLP, but they really are only suited to rack chassis setups, keeping them cool to be rewarded that great reliability that is). For most, M.2 for boot/system and a few sata ssds is perfectly fine, more than enough bandwidth/performance.

In a way, NVME is a bit of a 'look at my amazing low latency and crazy sequential bandwidth' when it comes to most folk. It won't make your computer suddenly run crazy-fast nor will it make your games or web-browsing faster. However for serious creators, ie video editing of 4k/8k footage, NVME makes one hell of a difference once you start working with a fair few layers of raw footage on a timeline, but saying that, even then you can still manage with good old sata if you don't mind the odd lag here and there when timeline scrubbing.

Tech these days especially, is like today's modern cars... most mid to top-end cars are pushing 0-60mph at close to supercar levels, most modern cars are more efficient though some give you crazy performance with the acceptance that they aren't exactly fuel-efficient... but look, you can still jump into your old jelopa and she will still take you wherever you want... not the best of comparisons, but I'm sure there are chaps out there still running scsi320 setups with ide drives.

Latest tech brings bragging rights to most, only the very few are actually in need of the gains from new tech. SAS will be around for years to come, no question about it. In my experience, NVME drives produce a great deal more waste heat, and that is down to how the drives internally do something similar to how raid operates, parallel multi-chip access and all... they're not 'advanced' technology per-se, they just sit on a wider-bus and are using old-hat tech to grab a lot more data to fill that bus up and have a very short path to the CPU with a very simple commandset.

Most consumer motherboards are still SATA orientated with multiple M.2 slots, why? because most consumers spend more on their graphics cards than they do on elaborate storage and network systems... but, by inheriting good old SAS tech from the enterprise world, we get to somewhat affordably roll-out some nice NAS type setups at home, and if keeping that electricity bill down is a priority, then that is where SAS does prevail over NVME, especially when you have 24 of the buggers in a chassis.

I wrote the above after devouring a noodles soaked in chilli... I gotta shoot, my batty is about to do a dragon on me.
 

tozmo

Active Member
Feb 1, 2017
142
102
43
74
For ServeTheHOME (HOME), U2 is probably more of a headache than its worth. It's like on Slickdeals when people freak about monitor or laptop specs. "Ryzen so much faster than comparable Intel." "120hz? Not worth it" "DDR4 CL18? Forget it" "Only 8gb of ram on a $400 laptop? Not worth it"

I imagine these people just sitting in their basements running cinebench just to put up numbers.

I wrote this on my 2015 MacBook Air with 4gb of ram, that is still completely functional and delivers performance for what I need. Consider it the jalopy in your example. I move to a different setup when I need to actually process photos and videos.
 

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
1,146
761
113
Northern California
Lots of tinkerers and bargain hunters here too though. There's undoubtedly going to be some folks that are less concerned with the interface tech and more interested in the fact that they can have a new....fast....Enterprise grade SSD with 3x the endurance for not much more (even buying adapter and cables too) than a so-so entry/mid-tier retail disk. But hopefully, anyone that buys because its reliability at a good price also have a plan to dissipate the heat! ;)
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
I dunno about you guys.. but going from SATA to NVME in 2014 was a great improvement in my day to day computer experience... things load faster, things load at once, software usage was smoother feeling. When loading websites I had visited cached images were more instantaneous than previous SATA drives. From the 2015 generation onward with NVME it wasn't noticeable though. When Optane came out I got that and it was once again 'wow' noticeable again. I've upgraded Optane capacity since then but still use Optane for my windows os drive + app drive. I use P4500 for storage\general usage on my desktop and other than moving files around no better than SATA for general storage\usage.

Additionally, there's 0 cable headache like there was in 2015\2016 where it was HARD to buy u.2 cables at all let alone affordable. Now they're $15 and you can get them all day retail from Intel, Newegg, Amazon, Etc... for m2 to u2 or buy affordable HBA + adapter to u2 cables and run 2 or 4 (with reduced overall performance). HOWEVER, this doesn't need to be done for a home\desktop if you don't want.. you can use a Funtin Adapter for these 2.5" but that's another $30 so the deal isn't so much a deal anymore.

Personally... my first two desktop NVME were the sticks now they've all been 2.5" so I can cool them easier, and I install them in a 3.5" bay internally.

There's a lot of choices to run 1 or more 2.5" NVME now days, and likely if you go that route you'll be able to use it for a couple years to come :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Dreece

Dreece

Active Member
Jan 22, 2019
503
160
43
I have to admit, I never noticed a difference going from a samsung pro sata to samsung pro nvme, ok, maybe just a couple of seconds faster on boot, maybe, I never bothered with a stopwatch.

Truth be told, the only time I noticed the benefit of nvme was in the VM servers (hyper-v and KVM), especially for thinly provisioned drives, plus video-editing, and of course not forgetting benchmarks.

But then I've always had a leading consumer cpu with fastest possible ram in the primary workstation with a board tweaked to the best I could achieve on water. Unfortunately I've always had a gateway server in the domain with a proxy running on it (squid plus sophos AV via icap along with a socks server etc up until 3 years ago after the big teardown), so that is kind of cheating as most of that work was offloaded to server and doubt I would have noticed any difference going from sata to nvme on that side anyway.

ps. for at least say 10 years now? I've had minimum 32gb in workstation though, past few years nothing less than 64gb. Pretty sure all that extra ram makes a difference in good old windows so again I doubt I would have noticed the speed bump jumping from sata to nvme. NVME is faster, but the gains I would argue considering todays processors and typical multi-channel x-gb's of ram kind of take away the shine IMHO... especially in the majority of workstation cases ie Q1T1.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: chinesestunna

chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
621
191
43
56
ps. for at least say 10 years now? I've had minimum 32gb in workstation though, past few years nothing less than 64gb. Pretty sure all that extra ram makes a difference in good old windows so again I doubt I would have noticed the speed bump jumping from sata to nvme. NVME is faster, but the gains I would argue considering todays processors and typical multi-channel x-gb's of ram kind of take away the shine IMHO... especially in the majority of workstation cases ie Q1T1.
Haha more RAM is always the solution to our problems :D

I recently upgraded from multi-SATA SDD raid0 array to NVME as well and haven't noticed a huge speed up either, definitely nothing like when going from HDD to SSD back in the early days (Intel X25-M anyone?). Don't get me wrong, what pushed me over the bar was experiencing NVME speeds on my 2017 Macbook Pro, that thing just does not slow down regardless of how much multitasking I'm doing.
Just wished U.2 Cages come down in price like SAS/SATA cages

Lots of tinkerers and bargain hunters here too though. There's undoubtedly going to be some folks that are less concerned with the interface tech and more interested in the fact that they can have a new....fast....Enterprise grade SSD with 3x the endurance for not much more (even buying adapter and cables too) than a so-so entry/mid-tier retail disk. But hopefully, anyone that buys because its reliability at a good price also have a plan to dissipate the heat! ;)
Exactly! Sometimes we just want new toys to mess with even if the gains aren't necessarily very noticeable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Dreece

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
423
148
43
36
I wrote this on my 2015 MacBook Air with 4gb of ram, that is still completely functional and delivers performance for what I need. Consider it the jalopy in your example. I move to a different setup when I need to actually process photos and videos.
Really depends on what you do. I thought my ThinkPad i7 was pretty sufficient on performance, until I check out one of our code repo and hit compile button. Took a good 45 minutes to finish its first compile.
 

amalurk

Active Member
Dec 16, 2016
311
116
43
102
Drives are labeled PM983 not 983 DCT according to the Ebay pictures. What is the difference? I am not sure, possibly same drives marketed differently with different labels.

Samsung here 983 DCT | Data Center SSD | Samsung V-NAND for the 983 DCT shows 0.8 DWPD for 5 years

While the PM983 here shows https://samsungsemiconductor-us.com/labs/pdfs/Samsung_PM983_Product_Brief.pdf 1.3 DWPD for 3 years.

Both have similar model numbers. Storage review article show different label for DCT than Ebay seller Samsung 983 DCT NVMe SSD Review but model numbers adjusting for size different might be the same model #s even with different labels. Maybe PM is like retail version.