Hello everyone, I have a fairly strange request. I am trying to acquire (at least?) two NVME SSDs, in two different form factors. I would like one of them to be M.2 form factor (up to 80mm) and the other a PCIe add-in card. I'm not looking for performance or huge capacity, just that the drives talk NVME. I don't even care how worn out they are. In fact if they're reporting bad sectors or some kind of SMART error that's even better, though of course I wouldn't want to pay much for those. I really just need them to power up and answer queries from smartmontools, anything else is secondary. That said, if someone has an older 256GB+ drive in good working health they want to part with for cheap then I'll plan to make use of it as a Steam drive when I'm done 
Anything smaller than that or with media errors I'll just toss in the closet after I get what I need.
A little background, I'm the developer of a free tool called pySMART (pySMART), which is a python wrapper for smartmontools. It's a nothing little tool for the most part, but there are a handful of commercial entities who I've allowed to use it, including iXsystems who at one point built it into the FreeNAS middleware. To be honest I've all but abandoned the tool publicly, however I still make use of it at my workplace. Along those lines, I'm creating some educational material for my workplace on various data storage topics, and I'd like to be able to discuss health monitoring of NVME drives with examples from smartctl. I have lots of SATA and SAS drives on hand, HDDs and SSDs, but I don't own any NVME drives at all to play with.
I took a quick look on eBay but I didn't see much for cheap other than useless 16GB Intel Optane M.2 drives at ~$12-15. There were some 128GB M.2 drives for ~$20 so I'll probably grab one of those unless someone has a 256GB for not much more? My bigger problem was the add-in card form factor. The cheapest AIC drives I could find were $80+ for 128GB, and most were a couple hundred bucks! The only other alternative was a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter for $15 or so, and another $20 128GB M.2 drive, $45-50 total for a drive I can't really even use for anything else. I really didn't want to spend quite that much on this project, so I thought I'd ask the community here what you all have. Best case scenario someone has an old beat up NVME drive that you no longer trust with your data but were too lazy to throw away, so I could pay you to ship it to me? Thank you for your consideration!
Anything smaller than that or with media errors I'll just toss in the closet after I get what I need.A little background, I'm the developer of a free tool called pySMART (pySMART), which is a python wrapper for smartmontools. It's a nothing little tool for the most part, but there are a handful of commercial entities who I've allowed to use it, including iXsystems who at one point built it into the FreeNAS middleware. To be honest I've all but abandoned the tool publicly, however I still make use of it at my workplace. Along those lines, I'm creating some educational material for my workplace on various data storage topics, and I'd like to be able to discuss health monitoring of NVME drives with examples from smartctl. I have lots of SATA and SAS drives on hand, HDDs and SSDs, but I don't own any NVME drives at all to play with.
I took a quick look on eBay but I didn't see much for cheap other than useless 16GB Intel Optane M.2 drives at ~$12-15. There were some 128GB M.2 drives for ~$20 so I'll probably grab one of those unless someone has a 256GB for not much more? My bigger problem was the add-in card form factor. The cheapest AIC drives I could find were $80+ for 128GB, and most were a couple hundred bucks! The only other alternative was a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter for $15 or so, and another $20 128GB M.2 drive, $45-50 total for a drive I can't really even use for anything else. I really didn't want to spend quite that much on this project, so I thought I'd ask the community here what you all have. Best case scenario someone has an old beat up NVME drive that you no longer trust with your data but were too lazy to throw away, so I could pay you to ship it to me?
Thank you for your consideration!