Good morning everyone.
I got the FlashMax II 4800 last night and spent a few hours testing it. Here's my impression:
The Good:
+ It runs significantly cooler than its' 1TB little brother. Under the same chassis (wedged between a Quadro 4000 and a Dell H310), it runs at 58C vs ~70C. Putting a fan directly on top of it blowing down, the temperature dropped to 47C.
+ It had 99.7% life left when I got it. So it's not brand new but close to it.
+ I set it up as ESXi data store, using "max storage" configuration. It worked at first try.
For a benchmark, I used CrytalDisk 5.2.0x64. Setup: Single 4TB VMFS (ESXi 5.5). Win7 guest setup with RAID0 of 4-1TB VM virtual drives on this partition. This is an example setup in the manual. I am not exactly sure why RAID0 of 4-1TB rather than 1 big 4TB virtual drive.
Results:
Mode: Seq Q32 / 4K Q32 / Seq / 4K
Read: 2456 / 255.8 / 951.8 / 24.47
Write: 951.7 / 214.1 / 810.2 / 47.88
+ Price: at $800, I don't think anything can get close to it in term of space and performance / price ratio.
The Bad:
+ It should work under PCI pass-thru to Win7 but for the life of me I can't get it to work property. Flash Manager detected it but kept on saying the partition is "Not-READY" and Status = "Critical". This is also the only way I know of to check for life left. Using disk monitor/performance monitor command line utility under ESXi shows everything work correctly. Status is GOOD under ESXi.
+ Can't find a way to see SMART data under ESXi. The only way to see how much life left was to PCI pass-thru to Win7 and use the FlashMax Manager.
+ It takes up a PCI3x8 slot for max performance. It may not matter to many setup but on mine, that slot belongs to a Quadro card