Samsung 1633a - MZILS960HEHP - Looking for Information on Firmware

[dizzydre21]

Hello all,

Long time lurker here.

I'm thinking about purchasing some used SAS3 SSDs to use as a metadata/special device in a mirrored ZFS pool. I've found someone selling used Samsung MZILS960HEHP-000C3 drives for a decent price and with a warranty. I believe the 1633a model drives suffer from the 32k hour bug, so I've been looking around for information regarding which firmware versions are needed to remove the 32k hour limit. The seller checked a few of the drives he/she has and says they are on firmware EQL8. The problem is that I can't find anything about that firmware version or exact part number on any website.

Anyone here familiar with them?

 

[DarkServant]

Sorry, i am not really familiar with the SAS SSD's ...whose i hope would disappear in the shadow of NVMe. There is much confusion about SAS firmwares, and they are even more difficult to obtain in their original Samsung OEM unmodified form.
As i looked at EMC pm1633a drive pictures, the firmware should be more like VET44Z1Q, but EQL8 can be a proprietary F/W for an EMC system. There isn't any guarantee that they work in standard systems, potentially unchangeable DIF sector-sizes can come your way or other problems.
Pay attention!
The standard scheme for Samsung SSD firmwares which consists out of eight characters, disappeared with newer SAS-SSD models, and some people told that those four characters F/W's are not original samsung OEM ones (like GXH1, GXL0, GXA5, GXG4...)

Choosing Dell standard-server SAS SSD's would be a better call IMHO.
For your specific usage scenario, going high with capacity and only use a small portion for active use (OP) is not a bad move, because i think the write load is quite high if i am not wrong and a lot of empty pages ready for write is crucial as are low latencies.