OCZ Talos 2 960gb SAS2 SSDs @ $180/ea

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Jordan Innovations

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Mar 25, 2018
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I've got a ridiculously overprovisioned home/small office Win Server setup that's got a beautiful SAS3 controller wasted on a bunch of Seagate SAS2 HDDs in RAID5, and have been aching for some SAS SSD lovin... Have <3tb of working data and another couple that could stay on the RAID, so all the cheap 200/400gb drives are out.

Was following the HGST 1.9tb SAS thread (super impressive that you all collectively figured that out) but they're too tall for my trays and I was late to the party. I saw some Dell 3.84tb SAS3 drives @ $1500/ea, but the way my bank accounts set up...

Imagine my surprise when I saw these OCZ drives...

Genuine OCZ TECHNOLOGY 960GB SAS SSD 2.5" TL2CSAK2G2M1X-0960 w/ Warranty | eBay

...on eBay @ $230 with "less than 100hrs" and stoargereviews had a pretty solid review. Checked here and didn't see anything about them in this board or the SSDS board, so I took a chance and offered $180 @ qty 4 ($720 shipped). If they work out I'll fill the other 4 slots and revel in the nerdboner that I imagine can only be achieved by saturating your 10gigE switch.

Thoughts? Good drives for file server/VM SAN? Good deal or meh?
 

Jordan Innovations

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Mar 25, 2018
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These showed up well packaged and when hot-plugged popped right up in JBOD (LSI 9361-8i)



They all showed years of power-on time, but three showed 100% life left and one showed 99%. Different firmwares and BIOS versions, but the Toshiba/OCZ tool picked em up and updated them all


I set up all 4 as RAID5 just to see how fast LSI's "FastPath" stuff is:


... but I'll be running these in RAID0 since I've got some spinning disks pulling nightly backups


As soon as I can throw some real sustained load at it, I'm curious what kind of sustained IOPS I can get out of it. I figure you guys'll tell me if I should be excited or not!
 

Jordan Innovations

New Member
Mar 25, 2018
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DiskSpd updates,
8 threads, all reads, 1gb files, random I/O - 107k IOPS, 837MB/s, 0.59ms avg latency
32 threads, all reads, 1gb files, random I/O - 180k IOPS, 1408MB/s, 1.4ms avg latency

32 threads, mixed 30% write 70% read, 1gb, random - 107K IOPS (75k read, 32k write), 837MB/s total, 2.3ms avg latency

I'm pumped with 100K+ IOPS in what'll be worst-case load for me, but I'll be digging through some threads to see if newer drives are faster.