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
 
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
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.
 
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

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.
 
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.
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.
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.
 
Wow - so I think I got real lucky in this lottery. My estimated life remaining is 99.77%

I've got a couple things to figure out. Apparently on my x99 Gigabyte Gaming Ultra board the bottom PCI-E slot is only giving me 4 PCIE- lanes? (maybe my Samsung 960 Evo nvme is taking the other four?) I can't use the third PCI-E slot up because it shares lanes with my first slot where my Nvidia 2080 is - which knocks my 2080 GPU down to 8 lanes. So I guess that leaves slot 2 - which is lame because that is going to share some heat from the graphics card being that it's the closest slot under the 2080.

Also my PCI-E slot is only doing 25 watts? What? I didn't even know you had to specify that it would offer up to 75 watts. I thought that was all automatic. News to me! Hmmm, do I want to trade performance for heat (on both GPU and IOScale) with the move to PCI-E slot 2? More testing is in order. My idle temp is 65*.

Looks like I have the newest firmware on mine with Firmware v7.1.17, rev 116786 Public according to the SanDisk release notes.

View attachment 217956

First round of benchmarks in current position with 4 lanes of PCI-E and 25 watts.
The I/O scale card went to 74* C in this benchmarking session. (open air Thermaltake P3 case - no fans)
View attachment 217957


99.77% life remaining in 2020 at purchase to 99.33% life remaining right now in 2024.

I finally have enough NVME SSDs that I'm ready to take this out of my system and sell it. I'm taking it out today.

Anyone interested? PM me if you'd like to buy it. Someone want a second one to RAID them?

Current fio-status -a

1707081979447.png
 
99.77% life remaining in 2020 at purchase to 99.33% life remaining right now in 2024.

I finally have enough NVME SSDs that I'm ready to take this out of my system and sell it. I'm taking it out today.

Anyone interested? PM me if you'd like to buy it. Someone want a second one to RAID them?

Current fio-status -a

View attachment 632692
sold to SamirD
 
has anyone had any luck getting these to work properly on windows 10, i tried but always had issues
 
has anyone had any luck getting these to work properly on windows 10, i tried but always had issues
No problems at all on my rig. Just followed the install instructions earlier in this thread and everything went smoothly. The Win 7 drivers work just fine.

What's the issue you're having?
 
i cant remember the exact issues i was having, but the command prompt deal said something like incorrect drivers or something like that installed, and i know it ran way slower than when i had it in windows 7, i was not trying to boot to it either.

anyone have a link to drivers as i tried searching this thread awhile ago and got a few dead links, i know i tried a bunch of drivers/tools but could never find the right combo it seemed, so i yanked the card out for now, it has been a few months since i tried though.
 
I have 2 6.4 tb's running in my Windows 10 workstation running the Sandisk SX300 4.3.7 drivers. I have another 2 6.4 tbs in my old Esxi server not sure which drivers those are on.
 
i cant remember the exact issues i was having, but the command prompt deal said something like incorrect drivers or something like that installed, and i know it ran way slower than when i had it in windows 7, i was not trying to boot to it either.

anyone have a link to drivers as i tried searching this thread awhile ago and got a few dead links, i know i tried a bunch of drivers/tools but could never find the right combo it seemed, so i yanked the card out for now, it has been a few months since i tried though.
I used the Dell Driver for the 3.2TB one I just sold to SamirD. It worked great.
https://dell-support.sandisk.com/

I've put it out on my google drive for you. I do not know for sure if it will work with the 6.4TB drive, as I never owned one of those, but I would guess it would likely work.

View: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pe7tbGL3iob0reMHmychSHdqKDI9LriF/view?usp=drive_link

They are legit, and unmodified, but if you prefer to search for them yourself on the web, since you don't know me - here is the file name:
Dell_IO_Management_3.2.15.1699_x64.exe

Here are some commands that are helpful to run once you get the drivers installed: (you have to run these commands as administrator)
Check disk endurance rating and temps:
C:\program files\common files\vsl utils\fio-status -a

Check Temperature Throttle Temps:
C:\program files\common files\vsl utils\fio-status -fj

Re-attach or rescan for errors: (where fct0 or fct1 or fctx refers to your particular device installed)
C:\program files\common files\vsl utils\fio-attach /dev/fct0
or
C:\program files\common files\vsl utils\fio-attach /dev/fct1
 
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Do the 6.4 tb and 3.2 tb fusion io drives work in Proxmox, Server 2022 or Windows 11? I know there are no drivers for esxi 8.0.
 
Do the 6.4 tb and 3.2 tb fusion io drives work in Proxmox, Server 2022 or Windows 11? I know there are no drivers for esxi 8.0.
Can vouch for Windows 11. That's all I've tried from your list.
 
Do the 6.4 tb and 3.2 tb fusion io drives work in Proxmox, Server 2022 or Windows 11? I know there are no drivers for esxi 8.0.
Should work on 2022 (worked on server 2019 at least). Proxmox you can do, but you’ll have to compile drivers yourself (https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/c...oscale-and-ioscale2-cards-with-proxmox.54832/). Supposedly works on TrueNAS as well (haven’t tried that personally though) via compiling your own driver. ESXi support ended after 6.7u3 when VMware killed off compatibility for all the older drivers.
 
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