WD – HGST – STEC 1TB MLC PCIe Solid State Accelerator $75

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RobstarUSA

Active Member
Sep 15, 2016
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So the drivers are built into the kernel? What is minimum kernel required? Anyone know? Does this show up as a /dev/sd* device? Is smart supported?
 

tritron

Member
Jan 15, 2020
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18
The drivers are included into linux kerel and windows drivers where attached in one of the posts. In arch linux I see
skd0p1 module is sdk that provides driver I dont belive smart is supported but I am sure drive outlives 1tb it provides.
 

epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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I did not install the windows driver, will try that.
Anyone know how to get the card seen in esxi?
 

azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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you might have to install the driver for esxi as well, just check their hcl page and make sure your esxi version are supported.
 

epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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you might have to install the driver for esxi as well, just check their hcl page and make sure your esxi version are supported.
I installed the driver for this from VMware site, it says its for esxi 5.5 onwards (I am on 6.0u3). Still cant see the card
 

azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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hmmm that is odd, can you try it on a windows box to see if the card works at all ?? I know for sure I had mine in an esxi in one of my test and i was able to get it to be detected as local drive after installing the drivers downloaded from vmware site.
 

epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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I tried in a windows 10 pc. It did not show up either. Now I am seriously concerned.
Is it suppose to show up like a SSD/hard drive?
 

azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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Does it appear as unknown device ?? Check your device manager for any new device that need attention.
Anyway the device appear as DM.JPG
 

acquacow

Well-Known Member
Feb 15, 2017
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I tried in a windows 10 pc. It did not show up either. Now I am seriously concerned.
Is it suppose to show up like a SSD/hard drive?
You have to install the drivers for it, last I checked, the latest ones were win2k drivers, that is what people have been installing in win10.
 

epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
785
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I have downloaded and installed the esxi driver from vmware and also the windows drivers but my card is still not detected. These drivers appear to be old. So I am wondering if there are newer drivers from other sites that I am not aware of.
 

azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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I've posted the driver I am using on my windows box, you can try that. I think I've tested to be working with Win10, Win2K12, Win2K16, Win2k19
Regardless though, before you can install driver you computer need to detect the hardware, and it would usually show up as unknown device or something like that in the device manager.
 

hmartin

Active Member
Sep 20, 2017
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Has anyone popped the heat sink off their card? I'd be interested to know what the ASIC is underneath.

I recently picked up some Violin Memory PCIe cards and they're using a Stratix V FPGA (unfortunately, Violin Memory went bankrupt in 2014 and my quest for drivers has hit a complete dead end).
 

SPCRich

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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I have a few of the STEC 1TB accelerator and they are great for what they are... Fast, tons of endurance but consumed lots of power and run hot constantly with or without load. I have one deployed as my plex cache/scratch drive and a few other as a local esxi storage for when I need to temporary keep my vm while doing maintenance on the zfs box.
Cam you run some benchmarks against it? I currently use a 32 GB ram drive for Plex transcoding, but sometimes hit 50-60% usage during a lot of streaming. If this is fast enough might be inclined to add one to my box
 
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pixelBit

Member
Jul 16, 2019
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Cam you run some benchmarks against it? I currently use a 32 GB ram drive for Plex transcoding, but sometimes hit 50-60% usage during a lot of streaming. If this is fast enough might be inclined to add one to my box
Here's a CDM of the four I purchased. The first two benchmarks are NTFS 128K and the bottom half are ReFS 64K

Smartctl doesn't return any info (in Windows), but Hard Disk Sentinel states that one of the four has a problem: "Failure expected on this hard disk
Status : Hardware Impending Failure Access Times Too High [ASC: 93, ASCQ: 21]" .

Also, the four drives I received wasn't securely erased; the initial drive I popped in had recoverable MySQL data. I didn't have the patience to completely scan all four, but they did reveal recoverable information.

The two drives that I can currently look at--both have exactly 17765 days powered on with just over a 1TB of writes.

STM0001891ED.png
Code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
                                  Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):  1828.856 MB/s [   1744.1 IOPS] <103727.51 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   607.919 MB/s [ 148417.7 IOPS] <  3440.68 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):   411.540 MB/s [    392.5 IOPS] <565559.96 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   298.858 MB/s [  72963.4 IOPS] <  7006.25 us>

Profile: Peak
   Test: 1 GiB (x3) <0Fill> [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
   Date: 2020/08/27 1:17:19
     OS: Windows 10 Enterprise [10.0 Build 19041] (x64)
STM0001891E9.png
Code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
                                  Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):  1823.719 MB/s [   1739.2 IOPS] <144326.39 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   603.164 MB/s [ 147256.8 IOPS] <  3467.82 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):   855.121 MB/s [    815.5 IOPS] <298855.28 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   305.591 MB/s [  74607.2 IOPS] <  6851.37 us>

Profile: Peak
   Test: 1 GiB (x3) <0Fill> [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
   Date: 2020/08/27 0:57:39
     OS: Windows 10 Enterprise [10.0 Build 19041] (x64)
STM000189221.png
Code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
                                  Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):  1819.218 MB/s [   1734.9 IOPS] <144884.53 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   608.027 MB/s [ 148444.1 IOPS] <  3438.98 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):   950.298 MB/s [    906.3 IOPS] <248074.94 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   299.164 MB/s [  73038.1 IOPS] <  7000.61 us>

Profile: Peak
   Test: 1 GiB (x3) <0Fill> [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
   Date: 2020/08/28 3:10:55
     OS: Windows 10 Enterprise [10.0 Build 19041] (x64)
STM0001891F6.png
Code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
                                  Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):  1806.659 MB/s [   1723.0 IOPS] <145874.19 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   620.190 MB/s [ 151413.6 IOPS] <  3370.77 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 16, T=16):   935.961 MB/s [    892.6 IOPS] <256752.32 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   296.378 MB/s [  72357.9 IOPS] <  7064.34 us>

Profile: Peak
   Test: 1 GiB (x3) <0Fill> [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
   Date: 2020/08/28 3:19:38
     OS: Windows 10 Enterprise [10.0 Build 19041] (x64)