good thing airflow is easy to addEach of these individual disks also show up under Crystal Disk Info. Here is a sample screenshot. Do note that my F80 is 1 gen newer and it may have fewer hours than your F40. However, do note the high temperatures as these server cards were built for direct air flow over them.
I do see the controller BIOS flash by and it does show 4 individual disks on it. I have never entered the BIOS but I can do that when I get home later. I will post some screenshots if someone is interested. However, I doubt that we can boot off these disks because these were built as disk caches for the Oracle Database Storage and ZFS server boxes. But one can always try.Does it have a bios like a standard raid controller where you could use it as a boot drive or are these strictly functional once you're in your os.
Standard disks cannot be beat for write performance. See my CDM benchmarks above. Ideally, these should be used for read intensive (not due to endurance ratings - no clue about that yet!) scenarios and were designed and deployed as such in Sun Oracle servers.Those are pretty impressive numbers... I've just started collecting 600GB s3500's so I don't know exactly what I would do with this beast but the price makes me want one.
Why are the sequential/random changing so much for the second set of benchmarks?I have used the previous gen F20 (4x24GB=96GB) and now use the later gen F80 (4x192GB=768GB) drives under Windows (8.x,10) and ESXi (5.5+). I am presuming that the F40 will behave no differently.
No drivers required for either OS. Each of the 4 parts shows up as a single drive each under each of these OS's. You can use them individually or as a stripe in Windows (use the standard Disk Management tool). Under ESXi, you can either use them as multiple drives and allocate them as 4 individual drives or pass them through (in which case you may RAID them under the guest OS).
Under Windows, I use the F80 striped as my Drive D: (Downloads, Steam Games, VMs, etc) for my main PC. When I deployed it, I benched it against my current setup. Here is a screenshot of the F80 striped (Drive E vs 3x Samsung Pro 120GB striped (underprovisioned to 110GB) (then Drive D). The top 2 are for T1 and the bottom 2 are for T8 workers. The bench PC is a i7-4770K w/32GB RAM and a 240GB Samsung 840 Pro UP'd to 215GB.
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Let me know if you folks have any questions. Enjoy your new drives!
Edit: All Oracle drivers and support for these devices are for the Oracle Servers they ship in. There is no support for consumer OS's and Windows OS's. But these do work just fine.
Edit2: More information below for CDI