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

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Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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I received my 6 SSD , SMART data are similar to Raileon's SSD.

I am liking these set of 6 SSD, it runs in IT mode , 4 individual SSD in one PCIe slot, no extra sata cabling , no mess.
Great for learning / playing CEPH or Storage Space in the lab.

In comparison, my other 1.2TB LSI Nytro drive only operate in RAID 0 mode.
 

J--

Active Member
Aug 13, 2016
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I received my 6 SSD , SMART data are similar to Raileon's SSD.

I am liking these set of 6 SSD, it runs in IT mode , 4 individual SSD in one PCIe slot, no extra sata cabling , no mess.
Great for learning / playing CEPH or Storage Space in the lab.

In comparison, my other 1.2TB LSI Nytro drive only operate in RAID 0 mode.
Wouldn't RAID 0 mode be desired? Are there no other options than to see them at individual drives?

Booting from a 100GB drive and software RAIDing the other three sounds goofy.
 

DavidRa

Infrastructure Architect
Aug 3, 2015
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www.pdconsec.net
Wouldn't RAID 0 mode be desired? Are there no other options than to see them at individual drives?

Booting from a 100GB drive and software RAIDing the other three sounds goofy.
Not necessarily. You could install two of them and create a Storage Spaces / mdadm RAID 6 volume, or mirrors across the controllers for some resiliency. You could dedicate one of the four mirrors for journals and three for SSD cache. Or install three or four for some seriously high speed yet highly resilient storage (three of them with a 6 device RAID 6 would give you a 400GB SSD that would survive a complete card failure and probably deliver 3+GBps).
 
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Boddy

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Oct 25, 2014
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Not necessarily. You could install two of them and create a Storage Spaces / mdadm RAID 6 volume, or mirrors across the controllers for some resiliency. You could dedicate one of the four mirrors for journals and three for SSD cache. Or install three or four for some seriously high speed yet highly resilient storage (three of them with a 6 device RAID 6 would give you a 400GB SSD that would survive a complete card failure and probably deliver 3+GBps).

Interesting idea, could you expand further (especially for few of us that are technically challenged) :)
Would multiple cards create heat problems as they run fairly hot already?
Cheers.
 

DavidRa

Infrastructure Architect
Aug 3, 2015
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Interesting idea, could you expand further (especially for few of us that are technically challenged) :)
I'm not sure what else to say - basically you install multiple cards and you will end up with a lot of disks in Windows Disk Management (or listed in Linux; I'm going to assume you know how to find them in the Linux world with dmesg/parted/etc).

Then you have the ability with Disk Management / Storage Spaces / mdadm / ???? to create a RAID volume. In the event something fails, and assuming you "done it right, 'n' stuff" your volume will be online but degraded, which allows you to extract the data before it collapses into a pile of electronic rubble.

If you have specific questions I'm happy to try to answer, though.

Would multiple cards create heat problems as they run fairly hot already?
Cheers.
You better believe it.
 
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Ninja1283

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Jul 10, 2016
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$60 offer auto declined, $65 accepted. May be able to negotiate even lower for bulk purchases, but still a good price!
 

Boddy

Active Member
Oct 25, 2014
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I'm not sure what else to say - basically you install multiple cards and you will end up with a lot of disks in Windows Disk Management (or listed in Linux; I'm going to assume you know how to find them in the Linux world with dmesg/parted/etc).

Then you have the ability with Disk Management / Storage Spaces / mdadm / ???? to create a RAID volume. In the event something fails, and assuming you "done it right, 'n' stuff" your volume will be online but degraded, which allows you to extract the data before it collapses into a pile of electronic rubble.

If you have specific questions I'm happy to try to answer, though.

You better believe it.
Thanks for the freedback @DavidRa!
I guess summarily you could set multiple disks up as a single volumn and have a huge cache?
It may be a stupid question, but can you have a multiple layers of cache: eg. cache to RAM e.g. Varnish; cache to PCIe; and, cache to SSD, like Intel SmartCache? When you want lots of cache (to avoid replying on spinning HDDs). Cheers
 

BackupProphet

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Jul 2, 2014
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I don't think you can configure more levels of cache for Varnish. Usually you just set a high malloc and swap to disk. Don't do that on Linux though, as Linux has high overhead accessing memory pages that are swapped to disk. FreeBSD has minor overhead.
 

abq

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May 23, 2015
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$60 offer auto declined, $65 accepted. May be able to negotiate even lower for bulk purchases, but still a good price!
@Ninja1283, which seller did you get to accept $65 ea? Any ideas on lowering the high shipping cost, which is quoted at $44.00 for 4 cards! Thanks Much.
 

Ninja1283

Member
Jul 10, 2016
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@Ninja1283, which seller did you get to accept $65 ea? Any ideas on lowering the high shipping cost, which is quoted at $44.00 for 4 cards! Thanks Much.
Went through the seller in the OP. No idea on lowering the shipping cost, but can't hurt asking the seller.

Granted, I would imagine the high shipping is just the standard eBay tactic to minimize eBay fees for the seller. (Charged on item selling price, not shipping).
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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The F40 card consists of 4 x 93gb SSD with a LSI controller.
I successfully installed and booted Proxmox 4.2 without additional drivers.
I enjoyed the F40 card operated in IT mode, more fun less SATA / SAS cabling and SSD mounting issues in the LAB.

I want more F40 cards.
 
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RobertFontaine

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Dec 17, 2015
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So if I'm understanding correctly the important thing to find is motherboard with a backplane that takes an obscene number of x8 pcie slots for a similarly cheap price to create a very quick little vm server. Which leads me to the question of how much bandwidth do you need to serve up desktop vm's from a vm server box? It would be nice to get all the vm crap off my workstation. I'm moving some up to Azure but I still have a stack of variations that I need to spin up on demand for product support.
 

abq

Active Member
May 23, 2015
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Went through the seller in the OP. No idea on lowering the shipping cost, but can't hurt asking the seller.

Granted, I would imagine the high shipping is just the standard eBay tactic to minimize eBay fees for the seller. (Charged on item selling price, not shipping).
Thank You Ninja1283
 

Zankza

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Feb 1, 2014
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Since I figured nobody else was using proper disk benchmarks, here's a proper one.