Need some new cache drives for home lab and a way to connect em?.....pick up a Sabrent!

[MrGuvernment]

Hey all,

Just wanted to let anyone know, if they needed to add some speed to a system, and didn't have any M.2 slots but had plenty of PCIe slots, I decided to pick up the
NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe X16/X8/X4 Card with Aluminum Heat Sink (EC-PCIE)
https://www.sabrent.com/product/EC-PCIE/nvme-m-2-ssd-to-pcie-x16-x8-x4-card-with-aluminum-heat-sink/

I just grabbed a Dell T620 (nabbed for $200 CAD!) to move my T5610 lab into so i can add more ram. (came with a Xeon E5-2640 6 core / 64GB of ram / H710p card and 8 x drive sleds)

Specs:

• Dell T620 (Tower case) with 8 x 3.5 drive bays
• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2658 v2 (moved from T5610)
• 196GB Ram (128GB from T5610)
• Perc H710p

I am either doing again a single node vSAN (it can be done) or possible nested 2 node again if i get more ram for my lab (I do a lot of HCI deployments around VxRail and such). I wanted something faster than my 2.5" Samsung 960 SSD's for the cache tier and so found these low profile snap in cards, vs the larger cards and Sabrent being a brand i know, and not wanting to spend a ton on it.

Taking the chance, arrived next day (thanks Amazon!) and I had my Sabrent PCIe NVMe adapter and a shiny new Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250G SSD.

Installed into my T620 set up and ran some benches on it, and seems to work well, good speeds for a $25 CAD adapter. Also work perfect with ESXi 7 however does not appear to be able to be used as a bootable drive in this T620, but oh well! ESXi runs of SD cards anyways.

 

[TheSlySyl]

I have a 1tb sabrent rocket Q as an NVME cache attached through a super cheap PCI-E 4x to NVME adapter I got for like $15 off Amazon.

I use Primocache as my software. Works more than well enough for me.