3.2TB Fusion IO Enterprise SSD For Only $250 (or less)?

hey guys so today I have something pretty interesting for you and that is this used PCIe enterprise solid-state drive now this particular model is a fusion IO IO scale and this thing has a whopping 3.2 terabytes of flash on it maybe even more amazing though these things are only going for about 250 dollars on eBay and in some cases you can offer and get them for even less the flash memory chips on this SSD are mlc so two bits per cell and if we zoom in here a little bit more you can see you can see that they're made by micron now these seem to have been a sand disc and now Western Digital product so using micron flash memory is a little bit interesting to me since I would have thought that it would have been Toshiba since that was a SanDisk's development partner now West digital's development partner course Toshiba is now called Kyoya because hey what better way to destroy brand identity than rename it to something really obscure because this is an enterprise drive though this thing has a ton of write endurance so if you look at your you know consumer grade 2 terabyte nvme drives on the market today the write endurance on them is only something like 1.4 petabytes this thing has 20 petabytes of write endurance so even though it's used chances are you have way more write endurance than your average consumer drive so if you've been looking for an SSD for like a game drive or something this is probably a pretty good option okay so here's the computer and first what I'll do is I will just disconnect this quick disconnect so I have room to maneuver that a card in so now that that's free and I can go ahead and find my logger by 16 slot and then remove the screw that holds the plate in or the back panel plate then I can go ahead and take this new SSD and get this into there and pop it in the slot and they can go ahead and reconnect my water-cooling which just just fits clearing that got the water counting secure now I can take my top screw and secure the SSD okay so next we're going to have to get the drivers and software for this drive so we'll go to Western Digital z-- Enterprise download site and you will need to make an account so if you just register for one and just select any of the options that come up like I think I just shows like the SanDisk Enterprise option and filled in to my information I was able to get an account very easily so once you've gone in and then logged in you can go and select the product so we have the i/o scale to select our OS which for me is Windows and then the release version which will just grab the latest version so then down here in the available downloads we can go to this firmware and the software binaries and we'll just select both of these but you can see they're added to our cart and then we can hit download all now let's go to our download area and we'll start with the software so we'll go ahead and install that next we'll want to open up my command prompt and the command we're going to type is FIO - status space-a for all and this is going to give us all the information about this particular SSD so you can see here it's found one IO memory device right it's sitting here it's an iOS Gale 3.2 terabyte down here some interesting stuff so this is showing us the PCIe slot power so this thing should be should should take up to 75 Watts but you can see here that this particular PCIe slot is electric only limited to like 25 watts or twenty four point seven five so I can go ahead and with some commands I can enable the full range of power which from what I've seen affects performance slightly not a lot but ever so slightly looking some more looking down further at some more attributes I can see the firmware version 7.1 point 17 which is the latest one so I actually I'm not going to use that firmware that I downloaded once again we see 3.2 terabytes we see the internal temperature so this thing is running about fifty two point six degrees Celsius some more power stuff and then here's probably the stuff that we were really interested in seeing so the rated petabyte writes so earlier I said these have an endurance of 20 petabytes and this drive is telling me it has almost 84% remaining so that's huge right sure this is a used drive but you know 84% of 20 petabytes is already greater than any other consumer drive I'm going to be getting brand new so this will last me quite a while the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to override that 25 watt PCIe limit the 25 watt limit is a default for expansion card from the PCIe spec but other cards like graphic graphics cards are allowed to draw up to 75 watts and well since this is in a my 16 slot that was meant for a graphics card and this board does support crossfire this slot should be able to supply 75 watts so to set that override if the command we're going to use is FIO - config space - p and then if io underscore external underscore power underscore override and then we need to enter the serial number of the device which you can get with FIO - status mine is 1 4 3 9 d 1 5 f a and then we're going to use : and then the number that we want to allow the override - so I want 75 watts so I'm going to put 75 and there we go that's that so to apply all these I'm going to have to reboot so I'm going to go ahead and do that now okay now that the computers back up we're going to go ahead and open up our command window again and one thing I neglected to mention earlier is make sure you do this as administrator and then where you will check to see if that PCIe power override worked with FIO - status space - a and we go up to the first block of information you can see now that PCIe power limit threshold is 75 watts so it was successful now we have to initialize and format the disk so enter your disk management and then when you first enter it you'll probably get a pop-up telling you oh hey there's an uninitialized disk so you can do that but I've exited that out so I can show you here we'll click this this disk 0 which is showing right around 3 terabytes I'll right click and it initialize the disk we want to use GPT weight okay now we can go ahead and click on this unallocated space right-click new simple volume and we'll just go through the wizard to set up our new drive so we want the full size a new letter this one yes it'll be I which is appropriate for IO scale and NTFS default I'm just gonna call this my IO scale and do the format and there we go now if you were to open up my computer you should see you now have the three terabyte SSD available so because we all love benchmarks I have a couple of crystal disk mark tests up here for you at the top left one is my samsung 970 Evo nvme drive top right is the new fusion-io scale 3 terabyte drive PCIe and the lower left is a silicon power p34 a 85 zani 12 controller nvme drive and in the lower right is a crucial M 4 SATA 3 SSD so quite old as you can see the i/o scale is not quite as fast as the latest nvme drives but that said it's not quite a bit faster and a good intermediary from the SATA drives to the nvme drives so overall I'm pretty happy with the performance especially for the price and you know for something that came out in 2013 I think this does quite well

Channel: FaRKle0079

Views: 3,817

Rating: 4.9452057 out of 5

Keywords: SSD, Fusion, Fusion io, ioDrive, ioScale, PCI-E, Enterprise Drive, SATA, Dell, HP, Supermicro, Sandisk, Western Digital, ioDrive2

Id: 9W7Ifyz5uR0

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020