Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[parkdale]

Absolute bargain 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

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.

[Chrysalis]

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.

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.

[parkdale]

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 

[dee.jay]

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.

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.

[dee.jay]

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+

[Chrysalis]

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.

[parkdale]

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  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 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 https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/samsung-870-evo-beware-certain-batches-prone-to-failure.291504/   

[parkdale]

Samsung 870 qvo all better now, re-plugged cables to device has fixed it no more errors logged so far.

[Chrysalis]

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.

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.

[parkdale]

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.

[Alex Atkin UK]

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.