Sun Oracle Flash Accelerator F40 400GB PCIe SSD - $99 + 15 BIN

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vBuild2BAU

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Feb 27, 2016
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wardtj said:
On boot you go into the cards BIOS and you can configure the RAID there. On the Warpdrives you can do that.
Click to expand...
So I could do a large RAID0 against the 4 drives and then create 3 x Virtual Disks ? of Say 128GB each?

What I am intending to do is use this as a vSAN write cache in a DELL C6100 with the 3.5" SATA Bays. I am wanting to put 3 x 480 GB SSDs in as Capacity and use the Warpdrive for 3 x VD for Caching. To create 3 vSAN disk groups per host.
 
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Arthur Krewat

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Apr 29, 2016
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The Sun firmware doesn't allow hardware raid, even though the embedded LSI controller can.

I heard something (maybe from this very thread) that someone was going to try to install the LSI Warpdrive firmware, but I don't know if they succeeded.

Logical sector size on these drives if 4096 bytes, so remember to make sure they align properly.
 
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vBuild2BAU

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Feb 27, 2016
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raileon said:
I either completely lucked out or I'm in for a headache soon... no problems yet.

For the people asking if you can flash the seagate firmware, the answer is yes. I hacked it into a card using IDA. The flash worked well and the card automatically did a raid 0 array and hasn't exhibited any problems except one.

It now only connects at pcie x1 width so my speeds are about the same as before which is just comical =)
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Just wondering if you had any further adventures with flashing Seagate firmware.
With the seagate firmware were you able to configure hardware RAID?
Were you able to overcome the PCIE x1 width?
Did you flash back the Oracle firmware?
 
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chiuljnk

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Apr 20, 2016
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Anyone try using these for Vsphere Flash Read Cache (VFRC)? When I allocate a VM to use this for VFRC, the VM hangs and even the host doesn't respond. But the SSD is fine, 97% life, good SMART data, appears to be fully functional otherwise.
 
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raileon

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Jun 22, 2016
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vBuild2BAU said:
Just wondering if you had any further adventures with flashing Seagate firmware.
With the seagate firmware were you able to configure hardware RAID?
Were you able to overcome the PCIE x1 width?
Did you flash back the Oracle firmware?
Click to expand...
1. It automatically did raid 0, the server sees it as one drive. I don't recall there being options for other raid levels but this was a while ago.

2. Nope. Never got it past PCIE x1.

3. I haven't tried but I would assume it's possible to do the same thing in reverse to get the original firmware back in there.
 
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HWGeek

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Sep 30, 2015
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Since the LSI Nytro Warpdrive seems to be bootable, I was wondering whether this one is as well or if the FW is preventing it? Sorry if it's been asked already.
 
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chiuljnk

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Does anyone else use these on ESXi?

I bought these to use as ESXi datastores and they just are terrible. The virtual machines stored on the F40 constantly hang and resume, over and over again. In the ESXi host's Events tab, I see these messages keep repeating:

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Description Type Date Time Task Target User
Lost access to volume 58abd865-17ceae81-39ac-78e3b5059440 (datastore2ssd (dl360g7a)) due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will be reported shortly. Information 2/23/2017 9:06:10 PM

Then 30-60 seconds later, it says:

Description Type Date Time Task Target User
Successfully restored access to volume 58abd865-17ceae81-39ac-78e3b5059440 (datastore2ssd (dl360g7a)) following connectivity issues. Information 2/23/2017 9:06:44 PM

Then it repeats again. This is on ESXi 6.0U2 but also happens on 6.5. There are a few posts that talks about the 6.5 vmw-ahci driver being problematic, but this problem occurs on 6.0 also and I verified I do not have vmw-ahci.

The thing is, I don't think the F40 is defective. I bought several, and the problem occurs on all of them, on different HP Proliant DL360/DL380 servers.

Anyone have the same experience?
 
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extremeodd

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Feb 21, 2017
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Man for a "game" drive in my desktop these drives are amazing. My roommate picked up two of these to mess around with in his DL380 G6 servers but abandoned the idea after one of the drives "lost" two of its SSDs and issues with the fan noise.
*Side note: It's trivial to bypass dl380 G6 fans, its the same technique as on the G8 just no one talks about it ;) *

So until he decides what he wants to do, I decided to see how useful they would be for my needs. The one fully functional card got installed in the "PCI Express 3.0/2.0 x16 slot (max. at x4 mode, compatible with PCIe x1 and x4 devices)" and the bad card with only 2 working drives in a cut out pci express x1 slot on my Asus z170p motherboard.

What surprised me the most is despite the limitations of the pcie x1 bus, the broken card blows away the Samsung 850 evo m.2 that I use as a boot drive. With just one of the 2 drives.... Sadly striping the 2 on that card doesn't do much to increase speeds as one can max out the bus, both tests were around 300 MB/s r/w.

As one would expect the other, fully functional card is blazing fast, with all four striped in windows 10 I was consistently getting 1k MB/s r/w.

For the laughs of it I striped all 6 of the drives and it's about what I had expected, boosted my read speeds by 300 MB/s but seemed reduce write. Sadly the screenshots didn't save, whenever I reconfigure them I'll try to post some benchmarks in various configs.

Is there anything I can do to utilize these to help improve Windows 10's performance? So far I've made sure the firmware was up to date (managed to update the broken card before it broke, the utility wont touch it now) and have set the page file to only that drive.
 
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