3 ms·

It's a 4-way M.2 NVMe raid card, which HP has ignorantly decided to populate with seemingly mediocre SSDs instead of the current gen flagships from Samsung or I

by Sephr 10y ago

It's a 4-way M.2 NVMe raid card, which HP has ignorantly decided to populate with seemingly mediocre SSDs instead of the current gen flagships from Samsung or Intel. You can remove the included SSDs and populate it with up to 4 960 Pro SSDs for what I imagine would be 14/8 GB/s sequential read/write performance. Unfortunately there's no way to buy it without the included SSDs, so you're better off with the unpopulated M.2/mini-SAS NVMe raid cards from Dell, HighPoint, or SuperMicro.

pault 10y ago
Do you happen to know what card that is? I couldn't find it in TFA. I'm not sure about getting the full read/write performance with 4 960s, since I think you'll saturate the bus with 2 or 3. Edit: tweaktown was able to get 9.2GB/3.8GB read/write on a non-bootable array: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7553/samsung-950-pro-pcie-gen-3x4-nvme-ssd-raid-report/index10.html http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7553/samsung-950-pro-pcie-...
gregmac 10y ago
> Unfortunately there's no way to buy it without the included SSDs Ah, brings back memories of buying HP servers several years ago. The only way to get the servers we needed was to buy servers pre-shipped with inadequate RAM and drives, rip it all out, and then install new drives and new RAM (purchased at the same time from HP, for an inflated price of course). We were left with a pile of essentially useless SAS drives and ECC RAM, and still had to do all the assembly in-house. I've never had so much trouble getting a company to accept several tens of thousands of dollars before.. or since. That project explicitly specified HP hardware, and as far as I know we never bought HP servers again after that experience.
- znpy 10y ago
  Why was hp hardware a requirement? What was so special about hp hardware?
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    Nobody ever got fired for choosing HP.
  - gregmac 10y ago
    Entirely political reasons. Driven by the customer and agreed to by our sales people before ever talking to technical staff.
- yardie 10y ago
  What shitty vendor is this? Our VAR handles all of that for us. 48 Dimms, 16 SAS drives, P420e, and loads of nics. And they did the firmware updates and checked for defects. The only thing I needed to do was rack it and kick off the PXE install.
  - gregmac 10y ago
    At the time, every HP reseller. They had some kind of gold/platinum/bronze partner system where specific resellers could only order certain parts. I don't know if this is still the case, but honestly the whole thing was an immensely frustrating experience. I could order direct, but was very limited in what I could customize. We worked with a couple different resellers, but they were also limited (each in different ways), and ultimately did purchase through one of them. I don't remember all the specifics now, but the main factor was the database servers which had high storage and very high I/O requirements. I think the only way to get the drive config we needed was to get something with 4 or 5x the CPU, and the cost accordingly skyrocketed. These days a couple SSD's could easily beat the performance of the 12 or so drives we had at the time, but in 2009-ish the limited SSD stuff on the market was out of reach.

by Sephr 10y ago

pault 10y ago

Do you happen to know what card that is? I couldn't find it in TFA. I'm not sure about getting the full read/write performance with 4 960s, since I think you'll saturate the bus with 2 or 3. Edit: tweaktown was able to get 9.2GB/3.8GB read/write on a non-bootable array: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7553/samsung-950-pro-pcie-gen-3x4-nvme-ssd-raid-report/index10.html http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7553/samsung-950-pro-pcie-...

gregmac 10y ago

> Unfortunately there's no way to buy it without the included SSDs Ah, brings back memories of buying HP servers several years ago. The only way to get the servers we needed was to buy servers pre-shipped with inadequate RAM and drives, rip it all out, and then install new drives and new RAM (purchased at the same time from HP, for an inflated price of course). We were left with a pile of essentially useless SAS drives and ECC RAM, and still had to do all the assembly in-house. I've never had so much trouble getting a company to accept several tens of thousands of dollars before.. or since. That project explicitly specified HP hardware, and as far as I know we never bought HP servers again after that experience.

znpy 10y ago
Why was hp hardware a requirement? What was so special about hp hardware?
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for choosing HP.
- gregmac 10y ago
  Entirely political reasons. Driven by the customer and agreed to by our sales people before ever talking to technical staff.
yardie 10y ago
What shitty vendor is this? Our VAR handles all of that for us. 48 Dimms, 16 SAS drives, P420e, and loads of nics. And they did the firmware updates and checked for defects. The only thing I needed to do was rack it and kick off the PXE install.
- gregmac 10y ago
  At the time, every HP reseller. They had some kind of gold/platinum/bronze partner system where specific resellers could only order certain parts. I don't know if this is still the case, but honestly the whole thing was an immensely frustrating experience. I could order direct, but was very limited in what I could customize. We worked with a couple different resellers, but they were also limited (each in different ways), and ultimately did purchase through one of them. I don't remember all the specifics now, but the main factor was the database servers which had high storage and very high I/O requirements. I think the only way to get the drive config we needed was to get something with 4 or 5x the CPU, and the cost accordingly skyrocketed. These days a couple SSD's could easily beat the performance of the 12 or so drives we had at the time, but in 2009-ish the limited SSD stuff on the market was out of reach.