Samsung SSD PM1643 3.8TB SAS 12Gb/s MZ-ILT3T8A 2.5" @ $289.98

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DouglasteR

Active Member
Dec 19, 2015
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12G Internal HD Mini-SAS SFF-8643 → (2) SFF-8680 Target-based dual port 29-pin drive receptacle

with Active/Active Round-Robin SAS Multipathing enabled. I couldn't figure out a way to make SAS wide ports work, but multipathing off a single HBA with four total drives works a treat!
Interesting, i have the same (or so i believe) cable but with 4 output ports.

Where in the MegaRAID software can i check if Multipathing and RR are active ?

I can confirm it says 12Gbps SAS but nothing else.
 

soaringswine

Member
Nov 29, 2020
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Interesting, i have the same (or so i believe) cable but with 4 output ports.

Where in the MegaRAID software can i check if Multipathing and RR are active ?

I can confirm it says 12Gbps SAS but nothing else.
it’s only supported in HBA / IT mode on most cards but you’d see two entries per drive in the HBA BIOS and two paths per drive in your OS that supports multipath (I’m using vSphere / ESXi 6.7).

then you just change the multipath settings to have both paths be active instead of Active/Standby and use something like round robin to make use of both paths.
 
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soaringswine

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Nov 29, 2020
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For reference, without dual path, my SSDs would top out at ~1000 MB/s which is the limit of SAS3 after considering 8 bit encoding.
 

soaringswine

Member
Nov 29, 2020
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Interesting, i have the same (or so i believe) cable but with 4 output ports.

Where in the MegaRAID software can i check if Multipathing and RR are active ?

I can confirm it says 12Gbps SAS but nothing else.
four output connectors on one cable won’t allow the use of the second SSD port due to bandwidth limits unfortunately. I actually had a four connector cable and sold it and got two of the dual port cables I linked above so I could take advantage of multipathing speeds.
 

DouglasteR

Active Member
Dec 19, 2015
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Very interesting, i managed to enable MIPO on mine, but only saw a marginal upgrade (margin error) in speed.

Time to get a 12 port HBA i guess :p
 
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azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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If you have the right dual port sas cable even with 6Gbps controller you should see major improvement.
You can validate if you have the right cable by looking at the disk management; without MPIO each drive should get listed twice.
Oh and btw MPIO really only supported on windows servers, although I did found a hack to enable it on windows 10 before but I cannot find the links anymore.
 

Sogndal94

Senior IT Operations Engineer
Nov 7, 2016
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Norway
Mine is showing like this:

View attachment 19008

Should it have more than one path enable ?
Looks like 1 path to me? (as you only have one path id) =)

Can we see you MPIO config. ( i dont think this is a cable problem) It looks to me like you have set it up wrong, since we can see the device two times.

Have you done? (can i see those?)
Get-MPIOAvailableHW
Get-MPIOSetting

Enable-MSDSMAutomaticClaim -BusType "SAS"
 
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DouglasteR

Active Member
Dec 19, 2015
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Looks like 1 path to me? (as you only have one path id) =)

Can we see you MPIO config. ( i dont think this is a cable problem) It looks to me like you have set it up wrong, since we can see the device two times.

Have you done? (can i see those?)
Get-MPIOAvailableHW
Get-MPIOSetting

Enable-MSDSMAutomaticClaim -BusType "SAS"
Sure, here's the results:

PS1.PNG

if you have the correct dual port cable, more than one path should be listed, which you'd then have both set to Active/Optimized. since there's only one path listed in your screenshot, it does not look like you have the correct cable.
Yes, i believe the cable being single path is the culprit.

Guess i need a new controller first, because all my ports are populated.

Thanks guys.
 

Jaket

Active Member
Jan 4, 2017
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Seattle, New York
purevoltage.com
Received my 2 Samsung SSD , it has newer firmware NA53 , and newer date: 2019 09

sg_format failed with
Fixed format, current; Sense key: Illegal Request
Additional sense: Parameter list length error
MODE SELECT command: Illegal request sense key, apart from Invalid opcode

I had to use setblocksize
sudo ./setblocksize -b512 -t1200 /dev/sg1

Completed format of first SSD in about 20min, formatting the next SSD now.

It is nuts, someone brought 18 units at $505 each, the same seller listed $225 each on Tue.
Just a note for anyone who has ran into issues formatting theirs. We had some HP drives that wouldn't allow us to use the sg command.

Downloaded this and compiled it and the above command worked great.
Thanks! :)
 

soaringswine

Member
Nov 29, 2020
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in the span of a month, I've now had two of these SSDs seemingly die in one of my hypervisor servers. they have good cooling in the server case and I wasn't hammering them that hard, certainly not enough to fail like this. haven't had a chance to do much troubleshooting other than boot into a Linux live CD and verify that I can't see them alongside the other two PM1643s I have. I need to check what my HBA card reports and reseat and swap cables and whatnot. will do sometime this week.
 
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Sogndal94

Senior IT Operations Engineer
Nov 7, 2016
116
73
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Norway
in the span of a month, I've now had two of these SSDs seemingly die in one of my hypervisor servers. they have good cooling in the server case and I wasn't hammering them that hard, certainly not enough to fail like this. haven't had a chance to do much troubleshooting other than boot into a Linux live CD and verify that I can't see them alongside the other two PM1643s I have. I need to check what my HBA card reports and reseat and swap cables and whatnot. will do sometime this week.
I know the PM1643 has had some issues with the firmware on dell and HPE atleast, so was the firmware up to date?
 

Sogndal94

Senior IT Operations Engineer
Nov 7, 2016
116
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Norway
hmm that's promising news! can you point me in the right direction for obtaining the firmware, or is this thread probably my best bet? https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...se-ssds-sm1625-pm853t-and-others.14014/page-2
I think you can download it from the samsung website? looks like Samsungs DC Toolkit might be able to update them. i am not at home, so was not to easy to find on my phone. (we just updated the drives from idrac directly). Looking at the ended listing it seems like Netapp disks, so i guess you can download the firmware from IBM.

I think you can use LVFS in linux to upgrade aswell. Should be "sudo fwupdmgr get-devices " and "sudo fwupdmgr upgrade" to update it.
 

bbqdt

Member
Sep 15, 2019
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If anyone finds the correct updated firmware please post it here, I went searching and came up empty
 

Sogndal94

Senior IT Operations Engineer
Nov 7, 2016
116
73
28
Norway
If anyone finds the correct updated firmware please post it here, I went searching and came up empty
I have tried to download the firmware from the netapp website, but you need to have registered a system with them to download it. So if someone had that, they might be able to help you.
 

nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
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Does anyone have the updated firmware. Took mine offline in fear of losing them to the firmware bug.
 
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