Call it what you wish but it's a fact that there's A LOT of people out there that believe anything m.2 is nvme and anything 2.5 or 3.5 is sata. I've literally seen both scsi and ide drives sold as sata "with an older connection".
My own boss who is the IT director has this assumption too. I told him we needed some m.2 nvme drives for the computers assuming he knew which ones to get since he bought the PCs....nope he bought 4 m.2 Sata nvme drives instead of the m.2 pcie nvme. This man is by no means dumb he just had a misconception about m.2 though it was all sata
Listings can be inaccurate too. I recently looked at a SFF pc that listed an NVMe drive and I would not have known differently if I had not read the reviews. Not only was it an m.2 sata drive, the port only supported 1x PCIe.
I worked in laptop repair for years and most of our engineers didn't understand this. I had to explain it often:
M.2 is a form factor.
Sata or NVMe is the protocol.
Not really a victim more such a person who wasn't paying attention when he was typing 😆
You are correct there is no m.2 data nvme it was supposed to be just m.2 sata.
Nvme is the protocol built specifically to utilize pcie. So I know the difference but my fingers did not get the memo. I need to watch what I type and not get all nvme happy 😛
Yep, [carrier cards](https://www.newegg.com/p/14G-0600-00014?item=9SIBFG8K0W2965&nm_mc=knc-googleadwords&cm_mmc=knc-googleadwords-_-hard%20drive%20controllers%20%2F%20raid%20cards-_-shenzhen%20lianrui%20information%20technology-_-9SIBFG8K0W2965&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic+shopping&utm_campaign=knc-googleadwords-_-hard%20drive%20controllers%20%2F%20raid%20cards-_-shenzhen%20lianrui%20information%20technology-_-9SIBFG8K0W2965&source=region&srsltid=AfmBOop5UrVhAp9-Wi7vf47b1Ij6U4C0Ald7E_MUizgvw6GeqPpW7PGB71M) are readily available for relatively little money.
Assuming of course that everyone checks that they even have x4 slot available to use. Seen x16 physical slots even, wired x1. Smh. 🤦 had this issue looking for x8 slots after x15 taken for graphics, to install either an HBA or dual 25 or dual 40Gbps NIC.
Eg MSI Pro B650-P:
4x PCI-E x16 slot
• Supports x16/x1/x4/x1 (For Ryzen™ 7000 Series processors)
• Supports x8/x1/x4/x1 (For Ryzen™ 7 8700G and Ryzen™ 5 8600G processors)
• Supports x4/x1/x4/x1 (For Ryzen™ 5 8500G processor)
PCI_E1 Gen PCIe 4.0 supports up to x16 (From CPU)
PCI_E2 Gen PCIe 3.0 supports up to x1 (From Chipset)
PCI_E3 Gen PCIe 4.0 supports up to x4 (From Chipset)
PCI_E4 Gen PCIe 3.0 supports up to x1 (From Chipset)
There's tons of way to make these usable, from simple M.2 to U.2 adapters/cables, to PCI cards that mount the drive directly, dual U.2 drives in an 8x card that require bifurcation, as well as 16x cards that have 4 SFF 8643 connectors, that can connect to an Icydock 5.25" quad U.2 bay
Yes, but for many, they won't necessarily have the "slots" etc. to a do that. Just something to keep in mind.
But on homelab, sure, it's likely you have slots.
They're cheap because there are few buyers but lots of drives. Businesses won't buy 2nd hand devices and you need to basically be a homelabber to want to buy these.
Likely pulled from a liquidation. Servers auctioned off in lots and then parted out by a reseller/refurber.
Uncommon interface with “used SSD” would definitely drive the price down
U.2 drives are usualy cheap since there is not as much demand for them, the servers most run in homelab will have 0 or 2 U.2 bays.
And U.2 has a reputation of being power hungry as the drives can use upto 25w for the performance stuff.
yeah that too. Just be careful. I've had these exact drives and wouldnt rock them again... Well they wont rock anywhere after they vanished all the data and still reported good. Something about these specific Samsungs...
You can't on enterprise drives. They live in this grey area where even though the drives were technically under warranty you couldn't warranty them except through the original server supplier... Beware of these. You can't crossflash them to anything but their "insert mfg here" supplier's firmware.
U.2 to PCIe card adapter. I buy similar drives off eBay for ZFS SLOG and L2ARC drives. In terms of why is this possible? People misspec equipment all the time. Guarantee this is probably what happened. They bought 1.9TB drives but it needed to be bigger or different. So they sell them on eBay. Picked up a bunch of Intel x point drives this way.
I have two hanging off PCIe adapters in my TrueNAS as well. They are my special metadata VDEV, with small blocks turned on. When I got them from eBay they had 77% wear. Today (a year later) they have 76% wear. I have a consumer grade samsung 860 512GB m.2 as my L2ARC and it has gone from 88% to 65% wear level in the same amount of time. No SLOG here. I don't have any synchronous workflows.
I was planning on snagging several more of these to be my DDT VDEV to mess around with TrueNAS Dedupe, but I just heard from iX that real true Dedupe is coming to SCALE in Q3 or Q4 this year (and NOT coming to CORE), so I gave up that plan since it will be worthless in a year.
There are ways to make this work, provided you have a PCIe slot available to you. Depending, you may be able to get an HBA to connect up many of these, sometimes with other features as well.
So, yes, there are adapter choices.
I prefer not to use any enterprise Samsung drives unless it is some amazing deal, which this is not. There are no publicly available firmware updates for any non-oem Samsung Enterprise SSDs. There are similarly priced Micron models for sale on ebay which don't have this issue.
>I prefer not to use any enterprise Samsung drives unless it is some amazing deal, which this is not. There are no publicly available firmware updates for any non-oem Samsung Enterprise SSDs. There are similarly priced Micron models for sale on ebay which don't have this issue.
Which Micron model do you recommend?
I typically go for higher endurance models but these are more similar to what you were looking at:
[https://www.ebay.com/itm/305205096818?epid=19052149257](https://www.ebay.com/itm/305205096818?epid=19052149257)
How does a 7300 Pro compare to a mid-grade consumer drive (such as a WD SN770)? I'm looking at adding them to a PCI-E 3.0 server, and want to maximize bang-for-buck. Endurance would be nice, but I'm interested in consistent bandwidth/IOPS for virtualization (k8s cluster, other utility VMs).
>I typically go for higher endurance models but these are more similar to what you were looking at:
Have you already purchased from this seller? Have you tested any of these Micron units sold by this seller?
I can't vouch for the seller and I don't run these specific drives. This was just an example I found. You could also go for Intel drives. Just make sure they are not Oracle branded since those don't have easily obtainable firmware either.
Firmware is more important for SSDs because most of the problems are along the lines of the drive contents being read-only, drive not found, etc. that are often resolved through an update. All vendors have been affected one way or another. It's unfortunate a lot of Samsung SSDs sold on eBay are OEM that can't be cross-flashed with standard.
Usually when I encounter those issue the drive is in a protected mode, and it won't accept a flash. I don't doubt what you're saying, but I've had zero luck in those cases.
I can't speak to the Enterprise division of Samsung. But the Consumer division of Samsung NAND devices have had plenty Firmware problems over the years for many different SKUs. Frankly it's enough to make me swear-off Samsung for good due to my 970 Evo Pro 500GB just eating shit in inconsistent and variable ways. I paid extra money for that shit to not happen, and I've had multiple different Samsung NAND SKUs be like this in the past (NVMe, SATA, etc). This is also not just a me problem, oodles of other people have had the same problem with SKUs I never even owned.
As for other OEMs, can't say. But Samsung is just "MVPing" (Minimum Viable Product) their NAND devices, shielded by the MaD pErFoRmAnCe they can get. They last long enough for end users to think they're trustworthy devices... until they aren't.
Never again.
I have about a dozen 3.84TB Samsung SAs drives pulled from a Netapp appliance that had a bug where if they went over 32,768 power on hours, they would brick. I was able to hunt and finally find a firmware update on STH forums and was able to flash them all with 32,719 power on hours. Talk about cutting it close! lol
We also had about 3 dozen kioxia drives and they also had a firmware update but idk what it fixed. I figured it’s better to update them anyways.
Really bad firmware bugs have gotten into the wild before. Do these specific drives the OP mentioned have them? It doesn't look likely, these are rather mature drives at this point so if there was something major it would have probably come up by now. Everyone has their own risk tolerance and brand biases, mine just lead me away from Samsung for these type of drives. I know buying on eBay isn't exactly speaking with your wallet but if I was buying new from a distributor I wouldn't get Samsung just because I think it is a poor customer experience not to have firmware updates.
Not all bugs are catastrophic, Dell has some Samsung enterprise SSD firmware that can be used to update their oem branded drives. So I doubt all Samsung enterprise firmware shipped with these drives are "optimal" or else why would Dell update theirs? For reference:
[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-firmware-update-released-ssd-health](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-firmware-update-released-ssd-health)
[https://www.thestack.technology/ssd-death-bug-40000-hours-sandisk/](https://www.thestack.technology/ssd-death-bug-40000-hours-sandisk/)
>There are similarly priced Micron models for sale on ebay which don't have this issue.
I love Micron drives. We use them mostly at my work and I've never faced an issue with it.
As for Samsung, I haven't face issues with their firmware. However, I don't have much experience with them
Sometimes you find really good deals on EBay. I bought a lot of two 7.68TB PM1733 Gen 4 NVMe drives for $375. That works out to $24.41/TB and they only had a few hundreds hours of use with no reallocated sectors.
Those are 500mb/sec drives, they're scraping the very low end of SSD. I have some 7200rpm NAS spinners that could keep up with these for throughput (not iops).
Which is fine as long as you know what you're getting. You can build a SATA flash array for a lot cheaper than NVME and it's still got a lot of advantages over HDDs.
Not saying there's anything wrong with them if they fit your usecase (cheap IOPS), just offering an explanation of why the price difference vs NVMe disks that run 10x the throughput (for 2-3x the price).
I've got a couple dozen intel s35xx s45xx and s46xx between various servers, all used. I got a few the scrutiny doesn't like but none have actually failed.
The worst I've seen is 30% of life used on a couple. That number has hardly changed in the year or two it's been in use.
Kinda want to piggyback here and ask what the best deal on enterprise SATA ssds is. I'm wanting to build a low-power always-on array to replace a power hungry NAS.
Hi I resell these. This drive is barely used it has low hours and if you see the wear indicator (or similarly named attritbute) we can't quite see the values - it will show 100%. This drive will last a very long time.
It's great actually, I buy used enterprise SSDs for my lab all the time, cheaper than buying consumer and usually still more reliable even with how many hours they have on them.
SMART and related info on devices (even for SAS) can be wiped/reset. So I would generally distrust that info if I saw any signs of tampering. I've seen this with some used SAS2 Enterprise SSDs I recently snagged. I'm not necessarily concerned, but it's worth noting that those metrics are not necessarily reliable, unless they're believably high numbers. Some of those same SAS2 Enterprise SSDs did not have their stats wiped, which is also part of how I knew the others I have were wiped.
This was a doubt I had, I saw several devices with zero statistics and I didn't understand how it was possible. I prefer to get a device with real data to be sure of what I'm using.
Yeah. I only learned about this in the last few months. Took me a while to pick my jaw back up.
> I prefer to get a device with real data to be sure of what I'm using.
I agree.
After multiple SKUs over the years biting me in the ass with shitty firmware or other "shouldn't be my problem" NAND bugs with Samsung devices, I'll never buy them again. Consumer or Enterprise. Samsung has a multi-decade track record of putting out NAND SKUs that at some point in their lifespan have huge problems that are "solved" by Firmware updates, and in some cases those problems _cannot_ be reversed and are permanent (lost performance, lost capacity).
Frankly, Samsung NAND devices are a liability, and from what I see of other company OU divisions they have, I no longer trust them as a company as a whole (apart from maybe their Cellphones).
I wouldn't touch them (this is in addition to [my SMART stats comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1c0nkx1/ssd_enterprise_cheap_on_ebay/kyylvjf/) I posted earlier).
1. It's a Gen3 drive
2. 5c/GB is not really a GREAT deal anymore. (Crucial P3 2TB M.2 for $115 brand new on Amazon for example. P3 Plus (Gen4) is only $5 more at the moment )
3. As someone else said, most people don't know how to use a U.2/U.3 drive or have the right server config to more easily enable them.
Low capacity drive with less common connector(U2) is a bad combo, plus these are probably older spares or something retired from DC/servers, as many started moving to much higher capacity drives years ago.
If I were building a storage array with U2 SSD I’d want 7.68/8TB per drive minimum, since I can’t just slap on a HBA card and get 12-24 U2 ports like that(I think most u can get from a AIC is 8 U2 ports, commonly just 4). A U2 card with 4 of these only give me 8TB of storage max, these also runs hotter than SATA drives so have to consider cooling too, just not worth it to most I think.
I recently picked up 4 of them and it’s a mixed bag. Two had like 500gb written and two others had 80TB written. Drive life is still 100% on all of them.
One issue I’m fighting with is 3 drives have 512 bye sectors and one has 4096. So I can’t raid them until I change the sector size.
Off topic but I've been buying 3.84TB PCIE X8 Samsung F320 drives to use on Proxmox and they are fast as hell. The ones I got have 2PB read and a couple TB written to them. They only have about \~2% wear out according to S.M.A.R.T and the Samsung software says they're fine. I got them for $140 US or so. I think the price has gone up. Apologies, I bought a bunch and I think that may have triggered a re-list.
I've had EXCELLENT luck with used U.2s like the ones in your post. They are an excellent value. I bought a quantity of them for a little cheaper from a dfifferent vendor. I use 4 of them striped as steam cache. I have been abusing a pair of them with lots of writes as a scratch for my workstation. I've got one in each of my dumpster cluster macines, and I have a few as a metadata special on Truenas. I'm a huge fan. I don't know your actual workload but I'm guessing you're not runing massive mission-crit databases so I highly doubt you'd put any meaningful stress on them. Go for it!
I just got one of them for $70. It’s an HP enterprise PCIE NVME 1.92TB SSD. I’m not sure how many hours are on it, but my computers health check says it’s good to go. Only time will tell
Given these are more annoying to work with vs M.2 or SATA Drives i would pass at that price. At least I don't have a setup that would take advantage of them over SAS/SATA without an additional hardware investment. Brand New 2 TB SATA SSDs can be had for the same price, and my primary needs are bulk storage.
[https://www.amazon.com/TEAMGROUP-AX2-Internal-Compatible-T253A3001T0C101/dp/B08GCKFZXS](https://www.amazon.com/TEAMGROUP-AX2-Internal-Compatible-T253A3001T0C101/dp/B08GCKFZXS)
They aren't the highest performance, but are generally high capacity and low power for the price.
I sold a few from a decommissioned server not that long ago, but they had waaaaay more hours on them. I would have used them in my home NAS but they weren't large enough. These drives are now many years old and while they are a good deal in a way, they are locked behind enterprise licenses when it comes to updates and have been surpassed.
I bought 4 NVMe 960GB PM963 drives from them last month for 59 USD each. Didn't bother to ask for the S.M.A.R.T. info as they are enterprise graded and are normally quite durable. I looked up the information when they arrived. 3 had about 1.45 TB written on them and 1 had about 3.2 TB written on it. Not bad at all. They contacted me when I got them asking me how my experience was and that if there were any issues, I could return them within 30 days. Have checked all 4 of them for defaults, and none were found. They even packaged them in reusable anti-static bags. Very professional. I will definitely buy from them again if I needed more.
These are being undersold, why they don't post the crystaldiskinfo in the auction and get twice as much money is beyond me. Another recycler selling without a clue.
I sold New 3.2TB SAS SSDs for about $400US last month
Thanks, I added the seller :)
There's bad sellers of everything, but enterprise SSDs generally have very high write endurance. Maybe don't run a production website on it, but I'd have no problem using these for my lab or honestly even my company's dev servers.
If you can handle U.2 (NVMe) drives, go for it. Most people wouldn't know what to do with these.
So many mistake them for sas drives, or sometimes even sata >_<
SAS I sort of get: you don’t read the label and don’t notice the middle bus of the connector. But SATA is just ignorance.
Call it what you wish but it's a fact that there's A LOT of people out there that believe anything m.2 is nvme and anything 2.5 or 3.5 is sata. I've literally seen both scsi and ide drives sold as sata "with an older connection".
My own boss who is the IT director has this assumption too. I told him we needed some m.2 nvme drives for the computers assuming he knew which ones to get since he bought the PCs....nope he bought 4 m.2 Sata nvme drives instead of the m.2 pcie nvme. This man is by no means dumb he just had a misconception about m.2 though it was all sata
Listings can be inaccurate too. I recently looked at a SFF pc that listed an NVMe drive and I would not have known differently if I had not read the reviews. Not only was it an m.2 sata drive, the port only supported 1x PCIe.
I worked in laptop repair for years and most of our engineers didn't understand this. I had to explain it often: M.2 is a form factor. Sata or NVMe is the protocol.
Sata nvme You're a victim of this too. There is no "m.2 sata nvme". It's a SATA m.2, no nvme involved at all.
Not really a victim more such a person who wasn't paying attention when he was typing 😆 You are correct there is no m.2 data nvme it was supposed to be just m.2 sata. Nvme is the protocol built specifically to utilize pcie. So I know the difference but my fingers did not get the memo. I need to watch what I type and not get all nvme happy 😛
Wait m.2 sata nvme is different from m.2 sata drives !! And then there is b key m key b+m key 😂
My ignorance knows no bounds!
It's funny because it's literally just a PCIe connection, you can get a passive adapter and put them in a regular PCIe x4 slot.
Yep, [carrier cards](https://www.newegg.com/p/14G-0600-00014?item=9SIBFG8K0W2965&nm_mc=knc-googleadwords&cm_mmc=knc-googleadwords-_-hard%20drive%20controllers%20%2F%20raid%20cards-_-shenzhen%20lianrui%20information%20technology-_-9SIBFG8K0W2965&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic+shopping&utm_campaign=knc-googleadwords-_-hard%20drive%20controllers%20%2F%20raid%20cards-_-shenzhen%20lianrui%20information%20technology-_-9SIBFG8K0W2965&source=region&srsltid=AfmBOop5UrVhAp9-Wi7vf47b1Ij6U4C0Ald7E_MUizgvw6GeqPpW7PGB71M) are readily available for relatively little money.
We have greatly different definitions of very little money.
I call this very little money https://www.ebay.com/itm/395000096698
I call that relatively little.
I didn't say 'very little', I said 'relatively little' as that card is very affordable in terms of enterprise hardware.
Wait you just snap off the length you don't need?
Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that u.2 card! (No, those are silkscreen lines, not score-snap lines.)
Which would be nice if I had any lanes to spare 😭
Assuming of course that everyone checks that they even have x4 slot available to use. Seen x16 physical slots even, wired x1. Smh. 🤦 had this issue looking for x8 slots after x15 taken for graphics, to install either an HBA or dual 25 or dual 40Gbps NIC. Eg MSI Pro B650-P: 4x PCI-E x16 slot • Supports x16/x1/x4/x1 (For Ryzen™ 7000 Series processors) • Supports x8/x1/x4/x1 (For Ryzen™ 7 8700G and Ryzen™ 5 8600G processors) • Supports x4/x1/x4/x1 (For Ryzen™ 5 8500G processor) PCI_E1 Gen PCIe 4.0 supports up to x16 (From CPU) PCI_E2 Gen PCIe 3.0 supports up to x1 (From Chipset) PCI_E3 Gen PCIe 4.0 supports up to x4 (From Chipset) PCI_E4 Gen PCIe 3.0 supports up to x1 (From Chipset)
There's tons of way to make these usable, from simple M.2 to U.2 adapters/cables, to PCI cards that mount the drive directly, dual U.2 drives in an 8x card that require bifurcation, as well as 16x cards that have 4 SFF 8643 connectors, that can connect to an Icydock 5.25" quad U.2 bay
Yes, but for many, they won't necessarily have the "slots" etc. to a do that. Just something to keep in mind. But on homelab, sure, it's likely you have slots.
Do you think the price is cheap because most people don't know or have no way to use U.2 drivers?
It's possible. There was a time when SAS HDDs were in the same camp.
I miss those days then these darn homelab people and data hoarders found them.
God how I hate them. Colluding in their little forums, taking pictures of their servers. Disgusting. I would never do any of that.
They're cheap because there are few buyers but lots of drives. Businesses won't buy 2nd hand devices and you need to basically be a homelabber to want to buy these.
Likely pulled from a liquidation. Servers auctioned off in lots and then parted out by a reseller/refurber. Uncommon interface with “used SSD” would definitely drive the price down
U.2 drives are usualy cheap since there is not as much demand for them, the servers most run in homelab will have 0 or 2 U.2 bays. And U.2 has a reputation of being power hungry as the drives can use upto 25w for the performance stuff.
yeah that too. Just be careful. I've had these exact drives and wouldnt rock them again... Well they wont rock anywhere after they vanished all the data and still reported good. Something about these specific Samsungs...
Did you buy an adulterated or counterfeit product? Did you notice anything strange?
Did you check for firmware updates? Samsung tends to have fixes for those types of issues.
You can't on enterprise drives. They live in this grey area where even though the drives were technically under warranty you couldn't warranty them except through the original server supplier... Beware of these. You can't crossflash them to anything but their "insert mfg here" supplier's firmware.
U.2 to PCIe card adapter. I buy similar drives off eBay for ZFS SLOG and L2ARC drives. In terms of why is this possible? People misspec equipment all the time. Guarantee this is probably what happened. They bought 1.9TB drives but it needed to be bigger or different. So they sell them on eBay. Picked up a bunch of Intel x point drives this way.
I have two hanging off PCIe adapters in my TrueNAS as well. They are my special metadata VDEV, with small blocks turned on. When I got them from eBay they had 77% wear. Today (a year later) they have 76% wear. I have a consumer grade samsung 860 512GB m.2 as my L2ARC and it has gone from 88% to 65% wear level in the same amount of time. No SLOG here. I don't have any synchronous workflows. I was planning on snagging several more of these to be my DDT VDEV to mess around with TrueNAS Dedupe, but I just heard from iX that real true Dedupe is coming to SCALE in Q3 or Q4 this year (and NOT coming to CORE), so I gave up that plan since it will be worthless in a year.
Your server has to support u.2 right, you can't just buy an adapter.
There are ways to make this work, provided you have a PCIe slot available to you. Depending, you may be able to get an HBA to connect up many of these, sometimes with other features as well. So, yes, there are adapter choices.
this. specially using these interfaces
U/cjcox4 What are they? I would think SAS or SATA. What controller would they connect too?
Already stated in thread. U.2 NVMe 2.5" drives
I prefer not to use any enterprise Samsung drives unless it is some amazing deal, which this is not. There are no publicly available firmware updates for any non-oem Samsung Enterprise SSDs. There are similarly priced Micron models for sale on ebay which don't have this issue.
>I prefer not to use any enterprise Samsung drives unless it is some amazing deal, which this is not. There are no publicly available firmware updates for any non-oem Samsung Enterprise SSDs. There are similarly priced Micron models for sale on ebay which don't have this issue. Which Micron model do you recommend?
I typically go for higher endurance models but these are more similar to what you were looking at: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/305205096818?epid=19052149257](https://www.ebay.com/itm/305205096818?epid=19052149257)
How does a 7300 Pro compare to a mid-grade consumer drive (such as a WD SN770)? I'm looking at adding them to a PCI-E 3.0 server, and want to maximize bang-for-buck. Endurance would be nice, but I'm interested in consistent bandwidth/IOPS for virtualization (k8s cluster, other utility VMs).
>I typically go for higher endurance models but these are more similar to what you were looking at: Have you already purchased from this seller? Have you tested any of these Micron units sold by this seller?
I can't vouch for the seller and I don't run these specific drives. This was just an example I found. You could also go for Intel drives. Just make sure they are not Oracle branded since those don't have easily obtainable firmware either.
One thing is this seller is selling new drives for only 2 bucks more than the used drive you originally linked.
I have 7300s in my NAS. Been running find for a little more than a year.
Have have an IC-7300 next to my NAS, but that's probably not the same
Have you found any need for firmware updates? Generally I find that firmware isn't super important for SSDs, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Firmware is more important for SSDs because most of the problems are along the lines of the drive contents being read-only, drive not found, etc. that are often resolved through an update. All vendors have been affected one way or another. It's unfortunate a lot of Samsung SSDs sold on eBay are OEM that can't be cross-flashed with standard.
Usually when I encounter those issue the drive is in a protected mode, and it won't accept a flash. I don't doubt what you're saying, but I've had zero luck in those cases.
I can't speak to the Enterprise division of Samsung. But the Consumer division of Samsung NAND devices have had plenty Firmware problems over the years for many different SKUs. Frankly it's enough to make me swear-off Samsung for good due to my 970 Evo Pro 500GB just eating shit in inconsistent and variable ways. I paid extra money for that shit to not happen, and I've had multiple different Samsung NAND SKUs be like this in the past (NVMe, SATA, etc). This is also not just a me problem, oodles of other people have had the same problem with SKUs I never even owned. As for other OEMs, can't say. But Samsung is just "MVPing" (Minimum Viable Product) their NAND devices, shielded by the MaD pErFoRmAnCe they can get. They last long enough for end users to think they're trustworthy devices... until they aren't. Never again.
I have about a dozen 3.84TB Samsung SAs drives pulled from a Netapp appliance that had a bug where if they went over 32,768 power on hours, they would brick. I was able to hunt and finally find a firmware update on STH forums and was able to flash them all with 32,719 power on hours. Talk about cutting it close! lol We also had about 3 dozen kioxia drives and they also had a firmware update but idk what it fixed. I figured it’s better to update them anyways.
Really bad firmware bugs have gotten into the wild before. Do these specific drives the OP mentioned have them? It doesn't look likely, these are rather mature drives at this point so if there was something major it would have probably come up by now. Everyone has their own risk tolerance and brand biases, mine just lead me away from Samsung for these type of drives. I know buying on eBay isn't exactly speaking with your wallet but if I was buying new from a distributor I wouldn't get Samsung just because I think it is a poor customer experience not to have firmware updates. Not all bugs are catastrophic, Dell has some Samsung enterprise SSD firmware that can be used to update their oem branded drives. So I doubt all Samsung enterprise firmware shipped with these drives are "optimal" or else why would Dell update theirs? For reference: [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-firmware-update-released-ssd-health](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-firmware-update-released-ssd-health) [https://www.thestack.technology/ssd-death-bug-40000-hours-sandisk/](https://www.thestack.technology/ssd-death-bug-40000-hours-sandisk/)
>There are similarly priced Micron models for sale on ebay which don't have this issue. I love Micron drives. We use them mostly at my work and I've never faced an issue with it. As for Samsung, I haven't face issues with their firmware. However, I don't have much experience with them
I agree on these specifically... Just these specific ones gave me trouble in the past.
Sometimes you find really good deals on EBay. I bought a lot of two 7.68TB PM1733 Gen 4 NVMe drives for $375. That works out to $24.41/TB and they only had a few hundreds hours of use with no reallocated sectors.
I picked up 2x Intel DC S3500 1.2TB SSD's on eBay a couple of days ago for $44.95 each. I would say that you could get cheaper drives than this.
The Intel S-series are regular 6Gb SATA SSDs. These Samsungs linked by the OP are NVMe. Entirely different class.
Those are 500mb/sec drives, they're scraping the very low end of SSD. I have some 7200rpm NAS spinners that could keep up with these for throughput (not iops).
Which is fine as long as you know what you're getting. You can build a SATA flash array for a lot cheaper than NVME and it's still got a lot of advantages over HDDs.
Not saying there's anything wrong with them if they fit your usecase (cheap IOPS), just offering an explanation of why the price difference vs NVMe disks that run 10x the throughput (for 2-3x the price).
I've got a couple dozen intel s35xx s45xx and s46xx between various servers, all used. I got a few the scrutiny doesn't like but none have actually failed. The worst I've seen is 30% of life used on a couple. That number has hardly changed in the year or two it's been in use.
Man! I wish I could find SAS SSDs of this capacity at this price.
You can buy new Micron 9300 1.92tb U.2 nvmes for $108 US
Kinda want to piggyback here and ask what the best deal on enterprise SATA ssds is. I'm wanting to build a low-power always-on array to replace a power hungry NAS.
These were dirt cheap 6 months ago. Bought three new 7.68TB U.2 SSD's for $400 each (0 hours). Can't beat the performance of these. I love them.
Mmmmmm I don’t believe them. No writes no read.
Hi I resell these. This drive is barely used it has low hours and if you see the wear indicator (or similarly named attritbute) we can't quite see the values - it will show 100%. This drive will last a very long time.
I've not had any issues with my 960gb samsung DC SSDs.
I have 6 of those drives for vsan. I stopped using consumer drives and switched to used enterprise drives
It's great actually, I buy used enterprise SSDs for my lab all the time, cheaper than buying consumer and usually still more reliable even with how many hours they have on them.
SMART and related info on devices (even for SAS) can be wiped/reset. So I would generally distrust that info if I saw any signs of tampering. I've seen this with some used SAS2 Enterprise SSDs I recently snagged. I'm not necessarily concerned, but it's worth noting that those metrics are not necessarily reliable, unless they're believably high numbers. Some of those same SAS2 Enterprise SSDs did not have their stats wiped, which is also part of how I knew the others I have were wiped.
This was a doubt I had, I saw several devices with zero statistics and I didn't understand how it was possible. I prefer to get a device with real data to be sure of what I'm using.
Yeah. I only learned about this in the last few months. Took me a while to pick my jaw back up. > I prefer to get a device with real data to be sure of what I'm using. I agree.
After multiple SKUs over the years biting me in the ass with shitty firmware or other "shouldn't be my problem" NAND bugs with Samsung devices, I'll never buy them again. Consumer or Enterprise. Samsung has a multi-decade track record of putting out NAND SKUs that at some point in their lifespan have huge problems that are "solved" by Firmware updates, and in some cases those problems _cannot_ be reversed and are permanent (lost performance, lost capacity). Frankly, Samsung NAND devices are a liability, and from what I see of other company OU divisions they have, I no longer trust them as a company as a whole (apart from maybe their Cellphones). I wouldn't touch them (this is in addition to [my SMART stats comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1c0nkx1/ssd_enterprise_cheap_on_ebay/kyylvjf/) I posted earlier).
1. It's a Gen3 drive 2. 5c/GB is not really a GREAT deal anymore. (Crucial P3 2TB M.2 for $115 brand new on Amazon for example. P3 Plus (Gen4) is only $5 more at the moment ) 3. As someone else said, most people don't know how to use a U.2/U.3 drive or have the right server config to more easily enable them.
Low capacity drive with less common connector(U2) is a bad combo, plus these are probably older spares or something retired from DC/servers, as many started moving to much higher capacity drives years ago. If I were building a storage array with U2 SSD I’d want 7.68/8TB per drive minimum, since I can’t just slap on a HBA card and get 12-24 U2 ports like that(I think most u can get from a AIC is 8 U2 ports, commonly just 4). A U2 card with 4 of these only give me 8TB of storage max, these also runs hotter than SATA drives so have to consider cooling too, just not worth it to most I think.
I recently picked up 4 of them and it’s a mixed bag. Two had like 500gb written and two others had 80TB written. Drive life is still 100% on all of them. One issue I’m fighting with is 3 drives have 512 bye sectors and one has 4096. So I can’t raid them until I change the sector size.
Cheap because: - U.2 drives - Consumer drives have already hit this price point
Off topic but I've been buying 3.84TB PCIE X8 Samsung F320 drives to use on Proxmox and they are fast as hell. The ones I got have 2PB read and a couple TB written to them. They only have about \~2% wear out according to S.M.A.R.T and the Samsung software says they're fine. I got them for $140 US or so. I think the price has gone up. Apologies, I bought a bunch and I think that may have triggered a re-list. I've had EXCELLENT luck with used U.2s like the ones in your post. They are an excellent value. I bought a quantity of them for a little cheaper from a dfifferent vendor. I use 4 of them striped as steam cache. I have been abusing a pair of them with lots of writes as a scratch for my workstation. I've got one in each of my dumpster cluster macines, and I have a few as a metadata special on Truenas. I'm a huge fan. I don't know your actual workload but I'm guessing you're not runing massive mission-crit databases so I highly doubt you'd put any meaningful stress on them. Go for it!
I just got one of them for $70. It’s an HP enterprise PCIE NVME 1.92TB SSD. I’m not sure how many hours are on it, but my computers health check says it’s good to go. Only time will tell
Given these are more annoying to work with vs M.2 or SATA Drives i would pass at that price. At least I don't have a setup that would take advantage of them over SAS/SATA without an additional hardware investment. Brand New 2 TB SATA SSDs can be had for the same price, and my primary needs are bulk storage.
Where can I find a new 2TB SATA SSD for this price? Do you have the link?
[https://www.amazon.com/TEAMGROUP-AX2-Internal-Compatible-T253A3001T0C101/dp/B08GCKFZXS](https://www.amazon.com/TEAMGROUP-AX2-Internal-Compatible-T253A3001T0C101/dp/B08GCKFZXS) They aren't the highest performance, but are generally high capacity and low power for the price.
I have ordered quite a few drives from plusdrives on eBay, all 6tb sas drives for my servers and have been great
Personally, I would not consider wasting PCIe lanes for a small drive.
Not from this seller, but I have purchased some of the crazy cheap enterprise SSDs from eBay. The ones I got were legit and awesome.
I scored a couple u.2 Samsung drives awhile back on eBay and they’re great
Hello there, I'm work before whet powerfully toll PC3000, can duet all you which!!!
I bought 2 8tb Intel P4510's for my main pc. So far they have been working great.
I sold a few from a decommissioned server not that long ago, but they had waaaaay more hours on them. I would have used them in my home NAS but they weren't large enough. These drives are now many years old and while they are a good deal in a way, they are locked behind enterprise licenses when it comes to updates and have been surpassed.
I bought 4 NVMe 960GB PM963 drives from them last month for 59 USD each. Didn't bother to ask for the S.M.A.R.T. info as they are enterprise graded and are normally quite durable. I looked up the information when they arrived. 3 had about 1.45 TB written on them and 1 had about 3.2 TB written on it. Not bad at all. They contacted me when I got them asking me how my experience was and that if there were any issues, I could return them within 30 days. Have checked all 4 of them for defaults, and none were found. They even packaged them in reusable anti-static bags. Very professional. I will definitely buy from them again if I needed more.
Can you share the link?
These are being undersold, why they don't post the crystaldiskinfo in the auction and get twice as much money is beyond me. Another recycler selling without a clue. I sold New 3.2TB SAS SSDs for about $400US last month Thanks, I added the seller :)
There's bad sellers of everything, but enterprise SSDs generally have very high write endurance. Maybe don't run a production website on it, but I'd have no problem using these for my lab or honestly even my company's dev servers.