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Dell EMC SSD questions

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Ikasu

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Looking to pick up a high capacity/high endurance drive for a houdini simulation target. ServerPartDeals has a Dell EMC p5600 6.4tb for a`round $350. Would these be compatible in a standard desktop? I'd be using a M.2 to U.2 converter to hook it up. But I'm very unfamiliar with Dell EMC drives. I could nab their genunine intel P4610, but it's PCI-E 3.0, while the dell p5600 (Also an intel drive, but with dell firmware) is 4.0, which could actually be beneficial with how massive these simulations get when reading the data and skimming through them.

I understand these drives have a special firmware for Dell PowerVault and PowerEdge systems. Also have a 520 byte block compared to 512. Would this be problematic to use on my Asus X570? Hopefully someone has experience in the enterprise realm and with these drives. Any advice and first hand knowledge would be appreciated.
 
520 byte sector drives will not work outside of the special systems with special OSes designed for them. I couldn't find any info on if the p5600 could be flashed to 512, but based on that low price, I'd expect the answer to be that it's totally locked and can't be changed. Most enterprise SSDs of odd byte size are ewaste, sadly, while most mechanical 520 byte HDDs can be flashed to 512.

I have a couple EMC 520-byters myself I wanted to see if I could modify (and I couldn't). They show up in the bios and OS as drives with no storage space at all and throw errors if you try to do anything.
 
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Darn. That's super unfortunate. I've found guides on how peeps have been able to format 520 and 528 byte drives down to 512 as you have mentioned. Such as..

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/how-to-reformat-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968/

But I don't have an HBA which seems to be a requirement? Wouldn't mind picking one up to try, but not much information out there on Intel Dell EMC drives. Most of what I've found are Samsung/HGST EMC drives. Probably too big of a risk to try for shits and giggles. I love messing with hardware, but too big of a gamble on this it seems. Might end up getting the Intel P4610 6.4tb on ServerPartDeals instead...$299 brand new with a 5 year warranty, just unfortunate it's PCI-E 3.0 based....bah.
 
I found that guide, too. Didn't work on my drives because 520 was forced by the firmware. Why they intentionally prevent these changes is beyond me when the stuff all costs the same or more as the 512 version when new.

Shame that the 4610 is so slow.
 
Grebuloner said:
Why they intentionally prevent these changes is beyond me when the stuff all costs the same or more as the 512 version when new.

Shame that the 4610 is so slow.
Click to expand...
Because they don't want you re-provisioning the boxes/shelves/drives into other systems, which could possibly cost them sales in the future. You bought it, you depreciated it over 5 years and now it's time to buy new ones (and new SLA or service contracts to boot) :) (Well, that's what the C level people think anyway.)
 
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