Kitz Forum
Computers & Hardware => Hardware - Deals & Bargains => Topic started by: parkdale on December 09, 2022, 03:21:01 PM
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Absolute bargain ;D used to be silly money!!!
https://www.novatech.co.uk/products/intel-solid-state-drive-dc-p4600-series-solid-state-drive-encrypted-2-tb-internal-pcie-card-hhhl-pci-express-3-1-x4-nvme-256-bit-aes/ssdpedke020t701.html
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Because nobody has any PCIe slots any more, modern boards they just replace them with M.2 NVMe instead.
Frustrated by this myself as I have one x16 for GPU, one x16 (x8 internally) used for a NIC and a x1 used for WiFi.
On another board I only have one x16 for GPU and one x16 (x8) for NIC. All spare slots are NVMe.
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So I am not alone then in this, I also have the opinion I dont like they replacing pcie slots with m.2 slots.
I use a pcie to m.2 card in my main PC its far easier than dealing with fiddly m.2 on the board.
Also thanks for sharing, I snatched the last one up, that is indeed a great price.
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Precisely, its silly as converting PCIe to multiple M.2 is easy and has potential for better air cooling.
Converting M.2 to PCIe is a pain as you then need somewhere to install the card and to trust random Chinese adapters.
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I did have a spare pcie x4 slot and x16 slot on my Asus Tuf Gaming Z690 D4, Alderlake i12700.. but do I need more storage? :-\
Currently have WD Black 850 1Tb, Samsung 980pro with heat sink 1Tb, Samsung 1Tb 870 Qvo and Seagate ST2000DM001-1ER164 2Tb, Also Synology DS 218Play 2x WD Red 4Tb in mirror mode. So still have 2 M.2 drive slots to use up.
I was trying to work out how many spare Pcie lanes I had left to use up :)
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My problem with this is sharing PCI lanes though...
I recently bought a 10Gbps network card for my main desktop machine, and because I have 2 x NVME disks installed in the system, the 2nd PCIE slot is disabled altogether. So that now means I have to get a motherboard upgrade ::) So that's nice. Luckily I was able to verify the 10Gbps card worked fine by dropping it into another machine - but ironically if I had known or remembered this was going to be a problem I would have just bought the new motherboard and moved the replaced one down to another machine - as opposed to have already buying a new motherboard. Woops.
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That's what's frustrating, they are increasing the PCIe lanes in newer CPUs but were ending up with less on the motherboard.
Also given PCIe 4/5, I believe they can MUX PCIe 3 into less PCIe 4/5 lanes. Its pretty much what the chipset does.
They're still playing the silly consumer vs business board game though and charging a fortune for the odd board that straggles the line.
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Yes, it is super annoying. Luckily, I really only want 10Gbps between my two servers as I'm about to start experimenting with Proxmox (for now). However, going to want to put a card in my file server too - and same problem there, though only worse because there's already a GPU and a HBA installed in the machine, and no other PCI-E 8x electrically enabled slots. The other route is to get a 10Gbps enabled motherboard, but then that's north of £300+
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Its here, looks brand new, no price on paper invoice so will check statement to see if its not been billed at something closer to its normal MSRP.
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My mate had the 2.5" 1.92Tb Samsung Enterprise SSD for £110 ;) we carefully checked the product after picking it up in person as Novatech is only 6 miles from where I live. Sales rep was impressed that we spotted it at that price.
They are clearing out old stock, so good for us ... we get Enterprise grade products for ;D ;D ;D Yes I did look at the normal MSRP!! and it should be brand new.
Mean while my Samsung 1Tb QVO drive has had a mad half hour :-X Don't know what's going on, but generating masses of Event ID 153 errors (The IO operation at logical block address 0x9a00da0 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\00000055) was retried)
Hard Disk Sentinel log... Problems occurred between the communication of the disk and the host 32636 times.
In case of sudden system crash, reboot, blue-screen-of-death, inaccessible file(s)/folder(s), it is recommended to verify data and power cables, connections - and if possible try different cables to prevent further problems.
I will copy all the data off, then format the drive to try and fix it :( So it could be either Data cable / Power cable or just going bad.
Samsung did have (maybe still ongoing) an issue with their Nand controllers, Sudden death of devices :o https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/samsung-870-evo-beware-certain-batches-prone-to-failure.291504/
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Samsung 870 qvo all better now, re-plugged cables to device has fixed it :fingers: no more errors logged so far.
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Yes that would make sense, errors that are not accompanied by reallocated sectors could be and often are caused externally to the drive itself.
Also email invoice confirms I got the great deal.
My plan is to replace the 970 EVO in this PC with this SSD, and the 970 EVO will go in 2nd machine. But before that as its easier, I will put in the second PC to test it out first.
Looking at the specs since this is 4 year old tech now.
In its day it was top of the range random writes, very good sequential writes.
Today its outpaced by SLC caches on high end consumer SSDs however this SSD gets its performance natively I assume via high channel count so its not conditional on SLC cache been available, I Can fully utilise the space also due to generous factory supplied over provisioning (usually i leave 10% of SSD unpartitioned).
Random writes on paper will be bit slower than 970 EVO but will see what it is in practice. My 970 EVO is only slightly faster via SLC for sequential writes and way slower when its natively writing to its TLC compared to the P4600. Not many consumer SSDS can write TLC natively faster than this drive even today. My 980 Pro can (slightly) but its one of a few. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/samsung-980-pro-1-tb-ssd/6.html
Enterprise SSDs I believe dont honour disk cache flushes in the normal way because of built in power loss protection, this provides a big boost to synchronous writes.
The drive would benefit either rig well, as my second rig uses ZFS to host VM's and ZFS isnt consumer SSD friendly, however at the same time, its still only home lab type use so even cheapo SSDs will be fine, and this PC I will definitely value the 2TB capacity this gives, hence the choice I made. Any video editing will be done on this drive knowing it has the endurance of a 500 ton truck.
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For me the 870 QVO was a no-brainer as I have two spots in the NAS that only fit 2.5" so I got 2x8TB off Amazon paid over 6 months, not at the same time mind you its been a gradual upgrade as required.
I recently upgraded the boot drive from a Crucial P1 500GB to a Crucial P3 4TB, I looked at an 8TB NVMe but the price is still insane. Most of the larger stuff on /home doesn't change that much, so it shouldn't push the writes. I had considered a WD Red NVMe drive given that's "supposedly" designed for NAS use, but the P1 has been fine so long as I didn't use it too heavily in read/writes as the SLC cache was tiny due to being the 500GB model and the P3 should handle that a lot better.
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I see there's P4600 2Tb for sale on fleabay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185284069887
There is another Intel enterprise class NVME for sale https://www.novatech.co.uk/products/intel-solid-state-drive-dc-p4511-series-solid-state-drive-encrypted-1-tb-internal-m-2-22110-pci-express-3-1-x4-nvme-256-bit-aes/ssdpelkx010t801.html
But the NVME 3.1 part has put me off slightly, some people have found they can't boot from it... still £59.99 still a bargain.
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PCIe 3.1 not NVMe, NVMe only goes up to 2.0c AFAIK and is the protocol not the bus.
I think the bigger problem is the 22110 size, not all motherboards have that size, some its not on the CPU (my desktop) lanes so that might impact booting.
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My bad.. should have re-read ... PCIe 3.1 not NVME :-[ . I see it's gone now. 22110 size would be ok on my motherboard, and would sit underneath the motherboard M.2 heat sink.
Last September I bought a 1Tb Samsung 980 Pro with heat sink for £99.79 with was cheaper than 980 Pro without! ;D
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I've seen a few SSDs show up cheaper with the heatsink than without, its weird when that happens but I'd guess as its common for motherboards to already have heatsinks they maybe don't sell as many?
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One M.2 slot out of 4 on my motherboard has no heat sink.. 980 pro was ideal for this.
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I've seen a few SSDs show up cheaper with the heatsink than without, its weird when that happens but I'd guess as its common for motherboards to already have heatsinks they maybe don't sell as many?
Probably only last 2 generations of boards, we had 2-3 generations mostly without heatsinks on m.2 slots. My board has no heatsinks.
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My bad.. should have re-read ... PCIe 3.1 not NVME :-[ . I see it's gone now. 22110 size would be ok on my motherboard, and would sit underneath the motherboard M.2 heat sink.
Last September I bought a 1Tb Samsung 980 Pro with heat sink for £99.79 with was cheaper than 980 Pro without! ;D
How you finding these deals, that price not as crazy as the p4600 but still unheard off.
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How you finding these deals
Too much time on my hands since I've retired :) Also since Intel have sold off their Optane Memory division, now owned by SK Hynix (Solidigm), or maybe Novatech had stock sitting on balance sheets for too long so needed the room.
Most of the time just happened to be looking at the right time...
For a short time couple of years ago I used to work as a stock controller for a clothing company, the amount of stock that was written off :o :o :o some prize items made their way to my place and not to the skip ;).
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Oh yeah I have seen that also, companies prefer to throw stock away instead of selling it for less as it devalues their brand.
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The UK didn't seem to get the good deals on Optane that the US has been getting to clear old stock. :(
Optane seems ideal for a boot drive as it its lifespan is insane compared to NAND. Its a shame they never could get the cost down enough to make it mainstream.
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It probably needed Intel to loss lead to get market share, which ARC has shown they wont do.
Was a waste, all that effort to create something then give up so soon.
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This is the flaw with Capitalism sometimes, they don't have the liberty to allow years for something to become profitable, especially if you're a company constantly chucking millions into R&D.
There needs to be a restructuring of how it all works, short-term share holders profits should not be first and foremost, there needs to be more focus on the long-term sustainability of the business. Its far too easy to run a business into the ground, cut your losses then form/take over another business and do the same.
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Yep, I am pretty sure standard SSDs took a while to become mainstream. Sometimes the patience just isnt there.
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Capitalism right now just baffles me. I'm sure I remember being taught that investing is a gamble and shareholders are not guaranteed a return. Yet at some point that turned on its head and shareholders returns are more important than a sustainable business.
Then again I briefly did business studies at school and the few things I remember are contrary to how modern businesses operate, that may also be where the above came from, I don't recall.
There is another Intel enterprise class NVME for sale https://www.novatech.co.uk/products/intel-solid-state-drive-dc-p4511-series-solid-state-drive-encrypted-1-tb-internal-m-2-22110-pci-express-3-1-x4-nvme-256-bit-aes/ssdpelkx010t801.html
But the NVME 3.1 part has put me off slightly, some people have found they can't boot from it... still £59.99 still a bargain.
Forgot to mention I was the one who snagged that, insane as looking now they are still going for up to £400.
Currently use it as a scratch drive when ripping Blurays. Would like to put it in my server but I'd need a PCIe x1 to 22110 adapter (assuming that drive falls back to x1 mode but I'd think so), which don't seem to exist. There are x4 to 22110 but as x1 are less common they all seem to be based on the smaller drives.
I'd still prefer Optane for the better life span though.
I'm waiting for a 10Gbit x1 NIC to come out instead as that seems more likely and then I could use the x4 slot for full bandwidth.
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Out of curiosity what was the price of the P4600?
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If I remember right was about £120.
However I wonder if I have anything outside of the very basic consumer retail warranty, as although these originally had a lengthy Intel warranty, Intel has now fobbed of the whole product line to another company who now have it listed as a EOL product with no way to get firmware, to register it etc.
This was very likely the reason for the heavy discount.
The drive is definitely considerably slower than my consumer drives in certain tasks, noticeably in single threaded i/o. As an example my 860 EVO sata SSD beats it in single threaded 4k, although it will beat that on sequential.
At the time I got this NVME prices hadnt yet crashed so ultimately was still good value, I am using it for my heaviest write type workloads of which I will appreciate NAND performance.
It does of course have certain niceness, 30% factory over provision vs the consumer standard of under 5%, power loss caps which allows the drive to ignore all fsync at the drive level (so will be fast in certain fsync workloads), the chunky heatsink it runs really cool, so because of the factory over provisioning I wouldnt care about filling up this drive, I manually over provision my ssd's normally at 10%.
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Enterprise drives are optimised for random IO though aren't they? WAY higher IOPS than consumer drives if I recall correctly?
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Enterprise drives are optimised for random IO though aren't they? WAY higher IOPS than consumer drives if I recall correctly?
Yeah on its release date it would have had a clear lead but bear in mind SSD's have advanced, this will be comfortably ahead on things like database writes (which are usually synced on every small write for data integrity).
On ZFS e.g. this will not only shine, but also have much lower write amplification as fsync increases amplification.
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One of my scratch drives in my NAS (which was the boot drive until I upgraded the PC) is at 39% wear which alarmed me, until I realised that's after 3.6 years. Which considering its a bargain basement Crucial P1 500GB, that's really not bad.
The P3 2TB which replaced it as the boot drive only 8 months ago is now at 2% which again can seem scary seeing a number go up, until you realise that's 33 years if accurate. I'm sure something else will fail on the drive before the NAND at that rate.