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

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Arthur Krewat

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Apr 29, 2016
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Following up on my own post, installed the card in a dell R710 with dual X5690's, and it works fine. This machine has a quad-port LSI SAS card, a Mellanox 10Gbe dual-port card, and a dual-port LSI 2008-based card. Works great.

Using half the card as a ZFS ZIL (mirrored) and the other half as ZFS read cache (raid 0).


Bought one of these cards, just installed it in a test machine I have - a Z77 based Intel motherboard. DZ77GA

This motherboard only comes with 2 x16 slots, and one x4 slot that can take longer cards.

Install the F40 in any other slot than the first x16, and it won't initialize itself, and is not seen by the operating system. Install it WITH an Adaptec RAID card, and the system locks up after the RAID card fully boots itself.

Anyone else have PCI-E related issues with the F40?

This motherboard gave me other problems too, like when ASPM (PCI-E power management) is enabled, the Adaptec locks up randomly) - so it might just be this motherboard. But without taking down either my main Solaris server or my two VMware hosts (all three are Dell R710's), I can't really test this in any other machine except a Windows workstation and who wants that anyway? :)
 

mmk

Active Member
Oct 15, 2016
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Czech Republic
Ironic that just about a week ago they refused my offer for $80 + shipping each. You guys in US should be happy about not having to pay shipping, these are like 35-40$ shipping+tax to Europe :p
 

100TB Cloud

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Mar 12, 2016
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Sign me up - I've just bought in and am going to try these for the same usage as most of you. Can someone just give me a quick rundown on the over provisioning or how to update the firmware? I don't need a step by step howto just a general gist of things. Also the over provisionining/performance modes - some of you say that it's the same performance? I'll just be using these in backup servers(ZIL or ARC recommended?) and CDN servers, most likely as a way to just give the system some fast / striped data to read from. I look forward to sharing my success or failures. :)
 

gbeirn

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Jun 23, 2016
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Has anyone put these in a HP Proliant? Curious if they cause the fans to go nuts. I've got a few spare PCI-E Slots and using those to get more storage in the box seems good.
 

zane

Member
Aug 22, 2013
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Can anyone shed any light about the "UNMAP feature" on these guys? I cant find much of any info about it.
 

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gisforgirard

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Nov 23, 2016
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Has anyone put these in a HP Proliant? Curious if they cause the fans to go nuts. I've got a few spare PCI-E Slots and using those to get more storage in the box seems good.
just bought two, have 2G6's and a G7, I'll let you know when they get here... hopefully it's not too bad
 
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sno.cn

Active Member
Sep 23, 2016
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Just accepted my offer at $160 + free ship for two. Worth trying lower.
So both of the cards I bought are showing 99% life remaining, and working great. One is doing ZFS cache and the other is on Storage Spaces, both in production machines. I've seen lots of posts about these running hot, but I'd say "medium warm" by touching them under load. Great solution to free up and extra drive bay :D

I tried an offer for another 4 @ $70 ea.

*Edit: Offer accepted for 4 @ $280 shipped.
 
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azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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what kind of performance do you get from using these drives as zil ?
 

Arthur Krewat

New Member
Apr 29, 2016
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Two things.

First, Solaris 11.3 x86 reports all four drives support TRIM/UNMAP using:

echo '*sd_state::walk softstate|::print struct sd_lun un_f_is_trim_supported'|mdb -k

Second, as ZIL, they never get used, EXCEPT when the blocksize is smaller than the ZFS recordsize. Which is great in front of large arrays that don't do well with small blocksizes. It added quite the boost to a 12x1tb raidz2 that is mixed-used, and some of that use is Surveillance cameras recording video using NFS - and the cameras do a crappy 4K NFS write size. So now, the array is a lot less busy because of the F40.

FYI, I have two of the 100GB drives as mirrored ZIL, and the other two as read cache. I already have 96GB of RAM, but I figured another 200GB of read cache couldn't hurt... ;)

In Solaris, doing:

zpool iostat -v <pool> 1

Will dump a verbose iostat including the ZIL stats and read cache stats. Not sure if that works for other ZFS flavors.
 

croakz

Active Member
Nov 8, 2015
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Seattle, WA
Anyone else get this on POST?

"Updating Adapter List!
Press any key to continue..."

This is on FreeNAS on Proxmox via pcie passthrough.