Whats the deal with U.2 enterprise SSDs selling so cheap?

[MC68000]

Tons of new drives different brands of U.2 NVMe drives even going for 5 cents a GB? even nice 3 DWPD disks ie WD sn840s etc.. They work great with M.2 to U.2 adapters no worries about thermal throttling or running out of SLC turbocache etc..

is it because enterprise going to ruler/E.1S format etc? Its like an all you can eat buffet of cheap really nice heavy duty high performance SSDs for home use now.

 

[i386]

Tons of new drives different brands of U.2 NVMe drives even going for 5 cents a GB?

Where?

 

[MC68000]

Where?

there are online vendors and at the bay a few weeks ago I ordered a bunch of New SN840s 6.4tb ssds for 320 bucks a pop for my DIT cart. lots of different choices within a good price range. I am done with consumer drives at this point and transitioned to enterprise SSDs.

 

[drdepasquale]

Supermicro eStore also has NVMe U.2 drives for good prices. I much prefer the 2.5" drives compared to the m.2 drives that overheat.

 

[mattventura]

They've been coming down steadily. I think there's 3 main factors:

1. There isn't a consumer market - average users want an M.2, not this weird box thing
2. Enterprises are upgrading to gen4 and gen5 (though gen4 prices are also coming down)
3. They've been on the market long enough that there's now a lot of surplus.

I managed to snag a couple 3.84TB gen4 U.3 drives for $174/each, though that seems to have been a fluke since the same seller has since raised them to 200.

 

[MC68000]

Supermicro eStore also has NVMe U.2 drives for good prices. I much prefer the 2.5" drives compared to the m.2 drives that overheat.

yeah they thermal throttle and then they are designed for benchmarks ie small SLC so you get impressive benchmarks but the moment you start slamming them with writes (ie dumping video,raw files etc)

 

[Tech Junky]

I went through a couple of phases trying to get away from spinners and first went with M2 drives and then found the U drives and price for larger capacity being better. I tried a couple of micron 7450 drives that failed in hours or less than a week and switched to Kioxia and haven't looked back.

I think prices are coming down just because there's a bit of a glut for inventory and the newness has worn off. The other thought is getting normal techies to adopt them and bring prices down for more sales. More of us using them will sway further adoption as we talk about them more and spread the word to less technical consumers.

Now if oems would just make it easier but putting the ports on boards instead of having to deal with adapters life would be better. I don't need 5 M2 sockets nor do most people. Adapting them to use U drives isn't expensive but it adds up at $50/drive per adapter and cable.

 

[reasonsandreasons]

Depending on the manufacturer they can also burn a fair amount of power. If you look at the datasheets the cheapest ones are often the most power-hungry (think 20W at load).

 

[T_Minus]

I went through a couple of phases trying to get away from spinners and first went with M2 drives and then found the U drives and price for larger capacity being better. I tried a couple of micron 7450 drives that failed in hours or less than a week and switched to Kioxia and haven't looked back.

I think prices are coming down just because there's a bit of a glut for inventory and the newness has worn off. The other thought is getting normal techies to adopt them and bring prices down for more sales. More of us using them will sway further adoption as we talk about them more and spread the word to less technical consumers.

Now if oems would just make it easier but putting the ports on boards instead of having to deal with adapters life would be better. I don't need 5 M2 sockets nor do most people. Adapting them to use U drives isn't expensive but it adds up at $50/drive per adapter and cable.

Intel was selling the cable\adapter for $14 the same ones included with the 900P\905P consumer optane u2 drive.

 

[T_Minus]

Depending on the manufacturer they can also burn a fair amount of power. If you look at the datasheets the cheapest ones are often the most power-hungry (think 20W at load).

Original gen and 2nd gen ALL use a boatlaod of power, even at idle!

To get to 20w+ you need to do non-stop writes, and in some cases adjust the power the drive can utilize. I haven't done it, but it seems NVME can be configured in different power modes, which is nice... too bad their idle power is still terrible.

 

[unwind-protect]

Hotplug is also expensive and potentially problematic.

 

[Tech Junky]

Intel was selling the cable\adapter for $14 the same ones included with the 900P\905P consumer optane u2 drive.

Well, I went oculink based on the speed of the drive to get the most out of it. I'm sure the $14 version won't unleash a Gen 4 drive at full speed.

 

[CyklonDX]

There's really limited amount of systems supporting U.2 disks (without caddies that costs too much), they also have lesser endurance than your typical sas3 ssd. Less builders are willing to go there - U.2 by itself has been a failure to adopt in servers.
U.2 disks have same better feature set vs nvme which typically comes at price of wattage (they also have P states), but often come in with more cache, better quality ram with greater endurance, and powerloss protection.

 

[kryten]

the sooner they move on to U.3 the better.

 

[ano]

nobody has enough u.2 slots and hard to cool

hotswap is also.. well it works sometimes, maybe 5%?

 

[NablaSquaredG]

the sooner they move on to U.3 the better.

U.3 Disks are cool. U.3 Backplanes are a bad idea.

 

[ano]

u.3 has been a slow performing shitshow for us

apparantly 45drives systems has it working, hpe definetly does not

 

[NablaSquaredG]

U.3 backplanes are incompatible with U.2 disks, so I'll avoid them as good as I can.

I can already see nice problems like "Why does this U.X disk not work?? Oh snap, it's a U.2 disk but the backplane is U.3"

 

[CyklonDX]

that's most likely why it has almost literal zero adoption. Well they (U.2 disks) will become quite popular in homelab as lsi 9400 gets cheaper.

 

[111alan]

Not that complicated. China is experiencing one of the biggest financial crysis in human history, with a lot of companies go out of bussiness every day. The main user group of enterprise drives is dwindling. If you're in China, you know this price reduction has been going for more than a year.

There were also some crypto mining operations like CHIA, and when the price of crypto coins fell, a lot of these mining disk went out into the second hand market.

The abundance of drives and the lack of users are the main factors. But the downward trend is ending, as many manufacturers slow down even halt production. Currently the price of SSD is rising rapidly here.