3.2TB SSD for $240

While I have no issue buying used SSDs, I'd be really hesitant to pull a FusionIO card (or IOMemory card) these days - if they were being used, they were being USED. A few years ago you had the tire kickers that never really put them into production - anything left was a log drive for a DB or the like.
 
Got my refund back, well that was a fun foray.

Looks like legit, new 4tb m.2 are almost down to $200, so that's gonna be my goal in the next few weeks.
 
I worked at Fusion-io for 6 years, I'm still buying up used FIO gear on ebay, but usually only if folks can provide the fio-status output.
There are still lots of gems out there. I got a brand new 3.2TB SX350 at the end of last year, that was a nice find.

I support lots of Fusion-io stuff over on STH in the main Fusion-io thread if anyone has questions.

-- Dave
 
That is a LOT of writing you guys are seeing on those drives!!!

I've used my 3.2TB one, since this thread began in 2020 as my Steam, GOG, Epic, and Orgin games drive.

I'm down to a whopping 99.38% life left which is barely below where mine was when I bought it! (99.77% was what my original life was) Which is less than 1/2 of 1% life exhausted in nearly 3 years.

Sorry to hear you got some worn out duds!

1677641504560.png
 
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Yeah, my two recent 3.2TB acquisitions are pretty young:
Code: 
[root@nfskvm ~]# fio-status -a |grep written
           Physical bytes written: 26,125,592,499,616
           Physical bytes written: 6,335,470,649,880
 
ChoGGi said:
Yeah, I thought I got an okay deal with a 69.something% when this thread was new.
Just checked, and it's 69.35% (also being used as a game drive)


You can bump the PCIe Power limit threshold to 75 to improve performance (seems to be for smaller files)
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...isk-fusion-io-iodrive2-to-improve-performance
Click to expand...
Driver should auto-detect the supported slot power configuration, but that's usually in server boards. In the cases that it doesn't the card limits it 25W for writes, which will hamper performance, especially for large files where the block sizes and throughput will be larger.

If your motherboard can support it, I definitely suggest configuring it for 75W writes, else, bump it up to what the board can support.
 
Archaea said:
That is a LOT of writing you guys are seeing on those drives!!!

I've used my 3.2TB one, since this thread began in 2020 as my Steam, GOG, Epic, and Orgin games drive.

I'm down to a whopping 99.38% life left which is barely below where mine was when I bought it! (99.77% was what my original life was) Which is less than 1/2 of 1% life exhausted in nearly 3 years.

Sorry to hear you got some worn out duds!

View attachment 552880
Click to expand...

Thought about pulling the trigger, but then after reading your usage perhaps the endurance is excessive for average users like me.

100 TBW after 2+ years of heavy usage,
That means a decent$80 Teamsgroup 2 TB sata ssd with 1.6PB endurance will get me 16 years of heavy usage....
So still an awesome drive, but probably not ideal for low power users like me. My windows boot drive after 2 years has a whopping 2 TB written! That 512 GB 970 evo will last long after I don't need it anymore.
 
RecentlyAdded said:
Thought about pulling the trigger, but then after reading your usage perhaps the endurance is excessive for average users like me.

100 TBW after 2+ years of heavy usage,
That means a decent$80 Teamsgroup 2 TB sata ssd with 1.6PB endurance will get me 16 years of heavy usage....
So still an awesome drive, but probably not ideal for low power users like me. My windows boot drive after 2 years has a whopping 2 TB written! That 512 GB 970 evo will last long after I don't need it anymore.
Click to expand...
These aren't the greatest deals they were back when the thread started and SSDs of this capacity were much more expensive, which was when I got mine. That said, some of us weirdos are big on reliable storage with a (very) long term endurance potential and the consistent performance offered by MLC and enterprise-grade hardware. Mine does just fine as a game drive and my video/photo editing scratch drive. The speeds aren't stellar by any means, but they aren't a hindrance, either. What I really like in my SSDs is that I buy knowing I'll be able to use them in a rig with a long use life and then move it to the next one without worry.

The number of drives now available with the low read/write stats look to be mostly dried up, which is a bit of a shame as I'm hoping for the 6.4s to show up.
 
Decided to grab one to play around. Manage to find the driver on Lenovo's website, but how are people getting this drive to appear on crystal disk and reading the total write on the device.
 
The dell drivers (and probably yours) install fio-utils. It's a bunch of exes, one of those is fio-status.exe (for finding your total writes, use -a to see more info).
Another useful one is "fio-attach /dev/fct0", use that if your computer crashes, and you don't want to wait in windows boot menu while it scans a couple terabytes.
 
Ehh.. this thing throttles quickly, guessing temperature. copying movie files from my Samsung 970 or inland m2, write speed gets cut to 10% almost.
 
RecentlyAdded said:
Ehh.. this thing throttles quickly, guessing temperature. copying movie files from my Samsung 970 or inland m2, write speed gets cut to 10% almost.
Click to expand...
It's designed to be installed in a rack. For best performance, make sure it's set to 75W power (it doesn't go anywhere close to that) and the controller has good airflow over it.
 
Is there a limitation with pci-e x4 being power limited to 25 watts? I tried the poweroveride command but when I run the status command it still at 25 watts.

good point on the airflow, I'll try to get a fan directly on it. Wish I can put heatsinks on the chip but since the card faces down, too risky to have components falling off
 
It's not a PCIe limitation, the card just has a default power limit of 25W. I think mine uses about 30W with the 75W setting. It's not a huge difference in performance and keeping the temperature under control is more important. I just have standard front to back airflow going over mine without anything in the way and it works well. Running the status command while it's going slow will give you some diagnostic info that might help.
 
The cards don't have any limits at all. The driver defaults to write limiting at 25W.
The setting is there because back in the day, Dell R600/700/900 servers only supported a total of two 25W cards and all the rest had to be 15W or less or you'd brown-out the server =P

I used to have R900 customers with large databases, and I had to get them to buy a rack-mount DC power supply so that we could power the ioDrives from outside of the box so that it wouldn't shut off under heavy write workloads =P

1681317431553.png


If you aren't seeing power-override enabled in fio-status, you enabled it incorrectly or used the wrong serial#.

Paste in what you ran and what you are seeing in fio-status.

Thanks,

-- Dave
 
First I ran fio-status.exe -a
fio_status.jpg


Then I ran the command
fio-config -p FIO_EXTERNAL_POWER_OVERRIDE 1439D1766:75

fio_ovr.jpg


But afterwards I look at the power limit it's still 75
fio_status2.jpg
 

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Aah, yes... the changes are at the driver level, and won't be applied until the driver is reloaded. I think you could just toggle the iomemory-vsl services in windows and it would apply the override when it starts back up.
 
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