Someone on the ROG forums was complaining about the PCIe slot that goes from the chipset isn't working properly, although it was from last year. I assume the latest AGESAs fixed that by now.
EU UK Cheap Fusion-io £150 3.2TB and £400 6.4TB PCI-e SSDs
- Thread starter YardBouncer
- Start date
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Hi
Thanks for flagging this up.
Like some others, I could not resist obtaining one of these IoScale drives. It came from ETB overnight in first class packaging. I chose one of the Grade “A” type (I had saved some money elsewhere recently) and the drive I received has only had 2.7% usage with 97.26% remaining.
I registered an account on the WD support site and downloaded the various Windows Package’s and also the IoSphere management package.
https://link.westerndigital.com/enterprisesupport/software-download.html
Interestingly, I could not download the software on the PC that I used to register my account, but I could log in and download the software on another machine, so I copied it over on a USB drive.
I placed the IoScale card in a simple Windows 10 desktop PC, just to check the operation. After installing the software packages the drive became usable.
Here is the output.
I have not yet decided where I will use this device, but so far it looks like a really good deal.
Thanks again for all the great knoweledge shareing on this forum.
Have fun.
RedX1
Thanks for flagging this up.
Like some others, I could not resist obtaining one of these IoScale drives. It came from ETB overnight in first class packaging. I chose one of the Grade “A” type (I had saved some money elsewhere recently) and the drive I received has only had 2.7% usage with 97.26% remaining.
I registered an account on the WD support site and downloaded the various Windows Package’s and also the IoSphere management package.
https://link.westerndigital.com/enterprisesupport/software-download.html
Interestingly, I could not download the software on the PC that I used to register my account, but I could log in and download the software on another machine, so I copied it over on a USB drive.
I placed the IoScale card in a simple Windows 10 desktop PC, just to check the operation. After installing the software packages the drive became usable.
Here is the output.
I have not yet decided where I will use this device, but so far it looks like a really good deal.
Thanks again for all the great knoweledge shareing on this forum.
Have fun.
RedX1
Nice, thats nearly a haiku!
Fantasticly well. I'm using mine for warm storage ie software and music. I have about 600GB of music and Winamp indexes it almost instantly. Solidworks has a toolbox with tens of thousands of standard fasteners etc all as small files; kills a rust drive. Zero lag with the FIO. I tried a few games out of curiosity, particularly ones without monolithic texture blobs. Unbelievable performance. You won't be sorry.
Flawlessly. I used the Server 2008 r2 drivers. From opening the parcel to the drive being installed, formatted and ready to go took about half an hour. Its painless. The crazy RAM specs are worst case ie QD64 running loads of VMs, 15k user databases etc. In heavy single user use I've not seen over about 300MB RAM usage which is nothing these days.
Funnily enough I had the same problem. Must be some cookie bug? I used a private Firefox window to make it work.
Theres a certain base level of heat produced by the FPGA under the heatsink but beyond that I suspect that it only starts glowing under very heavy use as described above. Mine is in a HP Z820 workstation. The PCI-e slots are partitioned off and cooled by one fan that draws air from the front over 4x 3.5" drives then the cards then exits. Not seen temps over 56 degrees science. And thats with a Revodrive 3x2 480GB, RTX2080, HP P812 RAID card that also pumps out the heat (and is longer than any GPU, literally the biggest card I've seen since ISA days).
If you are concerned about temps all you'd need is a smallish fan, say 80mm. To keep it quiet just run it on 7V (assuming its a 12V fan). You can get that by attaching the fan's + to 12V and it's ground to 5V. Some 12V fans run on 5V but most will be reluctant to start and even if they do may stop if they get a bit dusty. 7V seems to be reliable as well as quiet in my experience.
There seems to be no need for a 20k rpm screamer. Obviously your situation may be different; hot country, choked airflow etc.
There is one thing that took me by surprise with these cards. When I first installed it I left the side off my case and nearly blew my O-ring when the card started up. Theres a white heartbeat LED that pulses fairly smoothly on and off rather than blinking.
The reason it nearly made me change my trousers is because it looked EXACTLY like a welding arc. Many years ago (P3 days) I bought a cheap PSU that failed in a week. When it blew it struck an arc between two PCB traces near the rear and looked identical to that LED. When I opened the dead PSU the arc had eaten a slot about 2mm wide and 25mm long into the board. And it took out everything in the PC apart from one stick of RAM out of 3 and the CDROM. Everything else was toast; it popcorned most of the ICs on the motherboard, HDD PCBs, graphics card, SCSI card, etc. Absolute heartbreak. Luckily I'd just beggered myself buying a 1x speed CD burner (£250 at the time) and had backups of most stuff.
I'd mostly forgotten about that but seeing the pulsing white dot gave me PTSD-lite. So beware...
I bought one. Will report back if my Crosshair VII doesn't like it or that I just bought 3.2TB of SSD storage for ridiculously cheap.
Hell yeah if it does work!
Hell yeah if it does work!
Good man, hope it works. It was the space that first interested me, the high IOPs are just a (very nice) bonus.
If your BIOS allows it disable Option ROM download for that slot. The card doesn't need it and I've found it can help with compatibility.
If your BIOS allows it disable Option ROM download for that slot. The card doesn't need it and I've found it can help with compatibility.
Hi
Great thanks to @YardBouncer for flagging this up, and all his work. My experience so far has been extremely positive – so much so that I bought a second card.
My card came with v. 7.1.15 Firmware, I updated the card to the latest v. 7.1.17 Firmware using the IoSphere package.
If you install the windows IoSphere package you may need to create a “Firmware” folder – I needed to do this.
For Windows, verify that the following folder exists:
C:\Program Files\Fusion-io ioMemory VSL\Firmware
If the folder does not exist create it. After the folder is created, copy the firmware package fusion_3.2.11-20150618 to the directory.
My path is:
C:\Program Files\SanDisk\Fusion ioMemory VSL\Firmware\fusion_3.2.11-20150618
The drive needs to be “detached” from the system before you can update the firmware.
The Firmware update takes several minutes, please be patient. You will need to Reboot after the update is finished.
On my system IoSphere would not then find the card, even though I could see it was attached using fio-status –a.
I needed to uninstall IoSphere and then reinstall it to get it to recognise the card again.
Overall, this was a very painless process. Now, I have an up-to-date fully functional card.
I have a 120mm pwm fan about 30mm from the card, without the fan the card got to around 56C or so. The fan is running almost silently.
Thanks again to this great forum. This is a spectacular card.
Redx1
Great thanks to @YardBouncer for flagging this up, and all his work. My experience so far has been extremely positive – so much so that I bought a second card.
My card came with v. 7.1.15 Firmware, I updated the card to the latest v. 7.1.17 Firmware using the IoSphere package.
If you install the windows IoSphere package you may need to create a “Firmware” folder – I needed to do this.
For Windows, verify that the following folder exists:
C:\Program Files\Fusion-io ioMemory VSL\Firmware
If the folder does not exist create it. After the folder is created, copy the firmware package fusion_3.2.11-20150618 to the directory.
My path is:
C:\Program Files\SanDisk\Fusion ioMemory VSL\Firmware\fusion_3.2.11-20150618
The drive needs to be “detached” from the system before you can update the firmware.
The Firmware update takes several minutes, please be patient. You will need to Reboot after the update is finished.
On my system IoSphere would not then find the card, even though I could see it was attached using fio-status –a.
I needed to uninstall IoSphere and then reinstall it to get it to recognise the card again.
Overall, this was a very painless process. Now, I have an up-to-date fully functional card.
I have a 120mm pwm fan about 30mm from the card, without the fan the card got to around 56C or so. The fan is running almost silently.
Thanks again to this great forum. This is a spectacular card.
Redx1
Good work. Between everyone here we've got these things pretty well sussed out.
Appreciate the thanks but really its @acquacow whos the man with the plan.
He used to work for them and when I first got the idea to try using one as a normal SSD he reassured me that I could, told me the drivers to use etc. He's super helpful.
I'd seen the cards before but assumed they only worked in a particular environment and wouldn't work for 'normal' stuff.
The 'Fusion-io 1.2TB firmware upgrade' thread has all the details. I'll link it in a moment, lots of good info there.
They really are great aren't they? Quite tempted by another myself; got one slot left...
Appreciate the thanks but really its @acquacow whos the man with the plan.
He used to work for them and when I first got the idea to try using one as a normal SSD he reassured me that I could, told me the drivers to use etc. He's super helpful.
I'd seen the cards before but assumed they only worked in a particular environment and wouldn't work for 'normal' stuff.
The 'Fusion-io 1.2TB firmware upgrade' thread has all the details. I'll link it in a moment, lots of good info there.
They really are great aren't they? Quite tempted by another myself; got one slot left...
Ended up cancelling the order because my GPU shit itself. God damn, thats another €450 or so down the drain for a new GPU.
Lets hope they see my cancellation email in time before shipping my order.
Also left them a message on the chat.
Lets hope they see my cancellation email in time before shipping my order.
Also left them a message on the chat.
Yaay they cancelled my order. Now thats what I call service!
@thingy2098 I hope you have fun with it.
@thingy2098 I hope you have fun with it.
not bad, but on par with other cheap offers:
FUSION-IO 3.2TB IOSCALE PCI-E MLC SOILD STATE DRIVE F11-002-3T20-CS-0001 | eBay
SDFACAMOS-3T20-SF1 Sandisk Fusion ioMemory SX300-3200 3.2TB Internal SSD | eBay
BSoDs, crashes and now it basically hardlocks my entire comp when booting.
Waiting for the 5700 XT Toxic makes me wish for a nuclear winter.
That sucks. And that kind of thing, selfishly, is why I bought mine before posting about the source.
They've sold a lot (I'd say 15) through this thread, ungrateful sods that they are.
I'll email them and point out where the sales are coming from and see if they'll let STH folk buy them at the old price.
Have you tried another card to rule out PSU issues?
Also worth checking for bulging caps on the GPU or on the motherboard near the slot its in.
If its that shagged already you have nothing to lose. Look it over very closely in strong light, preferably with a magnifying glass.
Bulging or leaking caps, cracked MOSFETs and general shitstains are what to look for.
Sometimes when a component blows it breaks underneath so you can't see it directly; if you're lucky it leaves a brown/gray/black shitstain on the board. If you find anything post a photo just in case. Its a small chance but worth it for a decent card.
Source: Am electronics engineer. 75% of problems are easy, 25% are impossible.
Problems with machines are usually either anything that moves or power related, mostly caps, diodes, or FETs.
It ended up being my RAM. Yaay for AMD's dogshit IMC on Ryzen 1/2 gen. Hot as hell weather here in NL rn doesn't help either.
Oh well, it seems to be stable now, I tried different Ryzen Timing Calculator timings.