Wednesday, October 26, 2016

SUN ORACLE Flash Acelerator F40 400GB Solid State on PC

I have been lucky to pick 2 of these cards at under $ 120 each on eBay. After initial problems, getting the cards going, and reading up quite a bit, I decided to jot down the information and requirements for using these cards. And in the end, for $ 236, I had 800 GB of pcie SSD available....

Using it in a PC :

In order to use in a normal PC, you need a Standard Long Bracket for LSI Nytro WarpDrive, which is easily replaced with the half height bracket. Keep in mind the new bracket should be attached to the top-side of the card (same side as the disks) in order for the card to align correctly to the pcie slot. Hint: if you only see the disks green LEDs light up, without any status indicators - the LEDs closest to the bracket - then your card is not seated correctly in the pcie slot.

Firmware/Drivers:

To get the latest firmware, BIOS upgrade, you have to use Oracle support, and download Patch 24669037: F40 SW2.0 (PHASE 13.05.10.01 FW) UPDATE.  To apply the patch under Windows (10 included), you have to use the Seagate Nytro Utility Management. Inside the zip file, there is a folder win x86 rel, which contains the Windows ddcli exe tool. Note that you have to use the "Run as administrator" on the Command Prompt to access hardware.

ddcli on Windows 10


I was not able to apply the patch under Linux, or more specific, Oracle Linux 7, with a custom kernel 4.3.7, but was successful with Windows 10, and the firmware in the patch, using the same machine. However the ddcli (Linux version) included in the patch worked as expected.

Other than that, you can use the documentation for the NWD-BLP4-400.

Drivers are available in all modern O/S's.

Performance:

In comparison to OCZ RevoDrive 3, please note, nothing scientific, only for indication. I have a  4x disk Stripe, to get to Apples vs Apples, since the OCZ RevoDrive 3 uses 4 drives in a hardware RAID 0:

F40 Performance


OCZ RevoDrive 3

One complaint, though, the card tend to run quite hot, so adequate cooling/flow is required.

More than 1 card can be attached at a time, and the master (configured in BIOS) will take control of all the other cards. From O/S side, you still see separate controllers. If more than one card is going to be used, make sure that the Firmware/BIOS is on the same revision level.

Disks presented in Windows by 2 cards
Device Drivers


2 comments:

Cyber Knights said...

Hi,

Can windows be installed on one of those disk and booted up?

Pieter Malan said...

Hi Cyber Knights,

Yes, that is quite possible. The card uses a BIOS, and the disks are visible in the PC's BIOS, if using 'normal' boot mode. I am using a Linux UEFI installation, I boot from M.2 then switch over to a softraid across all 8 of the 2 F40's drives.

Still searching for a CPU to be able to cause any IO WAIT states, but getting closer ! I have a Xeon E5-4627 v3 10C 3Ghz, which sometimes pushes the disk to a maximum of 1-3% wait states.