Noticed some relatively new 8TB NVMe popping up on the market, most notably:
- Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus
- Corsair MP600 PRO XT
Curious what you guys think about those products as they seem to fit my goal at first glance.
at least on paper, they look very good. 176l Micron flash, Phison controller, 2gb onboard cache, 2.4% overprovisioned.
unless they’re configured poorly, they should actually be quite high end and worth using drives.
Of course, they’re no doubt very expensive, so it may be worth looking at enterprise scraps if you’re looking at prosumer drives that re that high end…
Do you think these can be used safely as home NAS drives so I can finally replace my 12TB noisy WD Red? Or are consumer NVMe write/reads still very limited (in terms of total lifespan) and should be used for less intensive stuff only? Not that NAS is very intensive, but still there are days when there is 24/7 writing/reading. thanks.
These look fine. I’d watch temps for a while just in case, but I don’t think you’re going to eat 6PB very quickly. The NAND flash it’s self will be a non-issue, and I don’t think these higher end Phison controllers will try to eat it alive if you have dram cache available.
With that said… How expensive is it, compared to something like these?
You just have to really watch out for those low-end consumer SATA SSDs, because they’re made to suicide through poor design choices, like having no dram cache on a sata SSD.
If it has a dram cache, or is nvme, and it’s 3-bit per cell flash or better, it’s probably safe.
I find it difficult to navigate enterprise products, because it always turns out there’s something odd about them that you wouldn’t care about if you needed it for a data center, but would care a lot if you need it at home. Like some weird power connector, or extremely noisy, or needing some special RAID card to get it to work etc. Other than that they probably make a lot of sense if you know what you are doing.
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Well, the good thing about sas is, the odd thing about them you wouldn’t care about in a data center but would at home is, you plug them into a SAS HBA, which are cheap and available all over ebay. That, and they typically draw a bit more power than a SATA drive would, but it’s not far off from consumer NVME drive power draw. I actually forget which is higher.
If you want to save a buck
The thing to look out for is which SAS connector the card has, and that it’s running in IT Mode
The product name will have something like 4i or 8i in it, indicating the number of drives you can connect. It will also have 1 SAS connector per 4 drives you can connect; this is normal and what you want. If you see a bunch of SATA connectors instead, these are still SAS cards, but avoid them anyway because you’ll need to buy more junk to use them.
LSI 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS 2308 FW:P20 PCI-E 3.0 HBA IT Mode For ZFS FreeNAS unRAID | eBay
This card is 8087, as are most of the cheaper SAS cards.
Look at the shape of the connector, and copy the name; it’ll be something like SFF-8087 or something. Other than the card, you need the SAS breakout cable to match. It should look like it fits the plug on your card on one end, and plugs into 4 very wide SATA connectors on the other. This is because these connect to both power and data at the same time. Aside from that, you plug standard SATA power into each of the cables.
Mini SAS SFF-8087 To 4 SAS SFF-8482 Hard Drive Forward Breakout Cable RAID HBA | eBay
The cable costs as much as the card most of the time. Note the wide connection with a plug for SATA power on the back. That’s what you need to plug into a SAS drive. The cables with smaller SATA datas on the end will need an adapter, and you cannot plug SAS drives into a SATA port, even with a SATA → SAS adapter; those are for plugging SAS drives into a SATA cable connected to a SAS port.
And that’s it! It’s just SATA drives with extra steps. You might need to format from 520 to 512, but that’s just typing some stuff into a terminal, and there’s a topic on the level 1 forums tutorialising that process with very clear instructions for SAS SSDs.
But, it’s up to you if the price premium is worth it to not have to think about plugs and cards, or wait for a used LSI card and expensive cable off ebay that’s shipping all the way from china. There’s nothing hard about using SAS SSDs, like there is with U.2, where you have to worry about actually cooling 25w of SSD, or having enough PCIE connectivity to plug them in anywhere. But, depending on the money you have to burn, and how much you value your time/are scared of PCIE cards, it’s a valid choice either way. I don’t judge. 
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I use Intel P4510 8TB, they’re U.2 so you’ll need to be able to bifurcate your slots or use a PLX card and hang them off that.
If you haven’t used U.2 before just understand that they suck quite a bit of power (up to 20watts) and as such make a good amount of heat so airflow is a must.
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Using the thicker 15mm variants with passive heatsink fins helps. But if you got a case where no airflow is flowing through your 2.5" mounts, that’s a problem.
The U.2 cables I’ve seen all use bog standard SATA power connector. Nothing you can’t solve with Molex <-> SATA
I’m not aware of any drive requiring that. You may need a HBA to get SAS connected. But no SAS = no SAS controller needed.
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Thanks for the detailed guide, much appreciated.
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I have one of the Samsung 870 Evo QVO 8TB drives. I like it a lot. You are correct that the write speeds are atrocious. This is NOT a drive for heavy IO. Instead this drive is fantastic for write-once-read-many usages.
Another unsung benefit of this drive, is that as far as I can tell, its the largest capacity 2.5" drive on the market. Well, barring clones from the likes of TeamGroup, etc…
What this means is that this drive lets you pack 8TB of space into a single 2.5" drive slot. Not even a 2.5" HDD can do that. Guess what kinda computer thrives on a single 2.5" slot? Intel NUC 
this drive is perfect for maxing out the capacity of your laptop or other mini PC device that has a single 2.5" SATA slot. Note that you will likely want to use a different drive as your boot drive, and use this one for mass storage.
This is a good option as well, I have one of these two and like it a lot, I got mine from Server Part Deals (they have eBay, Amazon, and web store fronts), but keep an eye on the prices, they have been fluctuating, as low as ~$380 or lower even over the past couple months.
dumb question though; wouldnt any sort of array made from a large number of U.2 drives eventually run up against PCIe lane availability limits? You can attach a seemingly limitless number of SATA drives, but PCIe does not seem to be as feasible for large arrays or even just large number of drives. Is it??
Your talking about the Samsung EVO drives, right? I don’t think they ever made a 8TB Evo SSD.
You can theoretically run U.2 drives off of only 1 PCIe lane which would make them just as numerous as SATA ports on any modern raid card; IE a card that supports 32 SATA HDDs will also support 32 U.2 NVMe drives.
I think the problem with this is that people don’t understand what cables they need to buy to attach the U.2 drives correctly.
Oops I had the wrong model, its the Samsung QVO 8TB, this one;
it was down around $300 earlier this year; keep an eye on CamelCamelCamel for the price drops
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I’ve been watching samsung pm883 prices like a hawk, They make a 8TB SATA version that runs on TLC NAND but the prices are still too high for me.
you mean something like this?
thanks for the tip, I was not aware that Samsung made other enterprise grade SATA SSD’s
Yeah, that’s it; there’s also a pm983 that’s alittle more expensive.
Their enterprise offerings are alot better than their consumer, at least in terms of TBW, long term data retention, PLP and performance consistency.
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One caveat though, the cable you linked (and many similar) only carry the SATA signals, just like a regular SATA cable would, but with the SAS form factor. SAS can work off those signals alone, but you’re missing half the theoretical bandwidth and some SAS features (AFAICT, I’m not an SAS expert). You can see it only has two differential pairs instead of four (even though the connector likely has pins for all of them).
Instead, you can look for backplanes or drive cages with SAS backplanes, those typically have SFF-8087 (internal) or SFF8088 (external) connectors and can use all available bandwidth.
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That’s pretty interesting. Any way I can verify/validate this is the case without relying on bandwidth testing? My SAS-6Gb drives are all mechanical spinning rust, so there’s no real way to verify bandwidth with those, as they top out around 100~150MB/s on a good day.
The card reports all the drives to be running at 6Gb link speed, though, and that’s what the card tops out at too. Is 4pair for SAS 12/24Gb? and 2pair for 1.5/3/6, or would I only actually be able to get 3Gbit out of this SAS card using these cables?
SAS 3/6/12/24 can all achieve their rated bandwidth without resorting to dual link. Dual link SAS connections just double the nominal bandwidth assuming you aren’t running them in the redundancy oriented dual path configuration. For example a SAS-4 SSD can achieve ~4.5GB/s when running dual path, twice the rated bandwidth of SAS-4.
Running a backplane with an expander will actually decrease your performance due to extra latency it adds to all your data requests.
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