oddball PCI-E SSD card

[Burticus]

Look what I found. Was doing an asset disposal at work, rolling a rack of gear out to get gone. Opened up to uncable everything and found this inside the cabinet brand new, didn't even know it was in there (also scored a 10tb SAS HDD, nice!)

Plugged it in and it shows up as 2 x 3.2 drives in W11. For grins I set it up as 1 big spanned 6tb drive and ran crystal on it. Boy howdy is this thing slow. It's faster than my ancient 7200 rpm 5tb hard drive I use for storage/backups, but is a fraction of what my NVMEs put out. And..... now I can't find the screenshots with the benchmarks and I don't want to install this thing again until the full height slot riser I ordered gets here. It was something like 800 mbs on read vs 200 for my hdd, vs like 8000 for my sandisk nvme. I wonder if the software spanning is not helping the benchs... I'll try again as separate drives when I get the riser. Considering the rack this thing was in had 10+ year old gear in it, this thing is not new, but 6tb of SSD space is nothing to sneeze at, and for something 10+ years old... it probably cost a fortune back in the day. Nowadays it's probably worth a hundy.

And OMG this thing gets STUPID hot. Like it was uncomfortable to touch even after just being in my system like 15 minutes.

I kinda want to take off the heatsink to see whats under there....

edit - google says these are from 2017. I saw some STH reddit posts about these being on sale for 250 back in 2023

edit 2 - going for $600+ on the bay. I have doubts.

 

[Nobu]

Yeah, probably would run faster without raid, or with a rippin fan on it.

 

[Burticus]

Yeah, probably would run faster without raid, or with a rippin fan on it.

It's pci half height so I don't know how I would work a fan onto this. It looks like it has grooved fins under the Intel plastic label. I can get a fingernail under it so it would probably pry off pretty easy and have exposed fins. But that would kill any resale value it might have if I do that. If I did I could probably work some 40mm fans on it but those things tend to be shitty airflow and noisy.

 

[Burticus]

https://www.newegg.com/p/2YM-0007-005Z1

I can only imagine what a couple 10k rpm 40mm fans would sound like, LOL. Like a harrier taking off?

Looks like Noctua makes 40mm, had no idea. $23 EACH yikes, this thing would need 2 at least

https://www.newegg.com/noctua-nf-a4x10-5v-case-fan/p/N82E16835608087

 

[Nobu]

Yeah, I'd try with a fan you have on hand first. If it makes zero difference, maybe scrap that idea.

 

[toast0]

Has an Oracle partnumber, no wonder it's spendy...

Thermal throttling makes sense, something like that is designed to be in a rackmount system with tons of air passing over it.

With an intel SSD, I'd be sure to get firmware updates done quick. We ran a different series, but had a bunch of drives that would disappear, but it stopped once we got them all latest firmware (maybe around 2018 IIRC). Was managed hosting, we had their ops replace the SSDs and I dunno if they had a way to fix it or they just RMAd them.

 

[Burticus]

Has an Oracle partnumber, no wonder it's spendy...

Thermal throttling makes sense, something like that is designed to be in a rackmount system with tons of air passing over it.

With an intel SSD, I'd be sure to get firmware updates done quick. We ran a different series, but had a bunch of drives that would disappear, but it stopped once we got them all latest firmware (maybe around 2018 IIRC). Was managed hosting, we had their ops replace the SSDs and I dunno if they had a way to fix it or they just RMAd them.

From what I read since it's an Oracle part you have to have a support contract to get updates, so I'm likely SOL there