Good bot

Good bot

I think I'm at 7x 18tb drives. I'm slowly replacing all the smaller 8tb disks in my server. Only 5 more to go. After that it's a new server with more bays and/or a jbod shelf.

Its only a problem when you get the electric bill! (Or the wife finds your ebay receipts)

I will say, it's nice not having to nickel and dime my storage.

But, the way I have things configured, redundancy takes up a huge chunk of the overall storage.

I have around 10x 1T NVMe and SATA SSDs in a ceph cluster. 60% storage overhead there.

Four of those 8T disks are in a ZFS Striped Mirror / Raid 10. 50% storage overhead.

The 4x 970 evo / evo plus drives are also in a striped mirror ZFS pool. 50% overhead.

But, still PLENTY of usable storage, and- highly available at that!

Cripes I was stoked I managed to upgrade from 4x 2tb to 4x 4tb recently.

I'm out of room to add more drives!

Every one of my servers is basically completely full on disks. I need more servers.

I actually looked up the chip numbers, and its a "splitter".

I, don't know WHY there is a splitter, as a splitter isn't needed, and these cards are advertised to only work on motherboards supporting bifurcation. However, there is indeed, a splitter.

The documentation is also, REALLY horribly translated.

Note: Without pcie splitter function in this host adapter (ASM1182E chip), so motherboard must support PCIe Bifurcation. Otherwise, only one M.2 PCIe SSD will be recognized. If you are not sure PCIe Bifurcation of your motherboard, please consult motherboard munufacture or contact us via amazon message

Here is the documentation for the chip itself: https://www.asmedia.com.tw/product/213yQcasx8gNAzS4/b7FyQBCxz2URbzg0

I, am not 100% certain how, where, or why it fits in there. Perhaps, its for link power management? Or something.

But, I can confirm, these cards DO require bifurcation to be enabled. Without bifurcation, you only see the first drive.

I host a few handfuls of websites, some discord bots.

I hoard Linux isos. I use it for general purpose learning and experimentation.

There is also kubernetes running, source control, and a bit of everything else.

ebay! You can pick up these "used" enterprise NVMe and SSDs for CHEAP. All 10 arrived with less than 5% wear.

Hopefully that doesn't happen soon! I don't have too much room for more flash, lol.

But, I have quite a bit of available space, so, there shouldn't be any concerns. Also- tomorrow, after a few adapters arrives, I'll be adding another 2x 1T flash drives my Optiplex 5060 SFF.

Dual Slot Bifurcation Card Those are the ones I just picked up.

If you have a x16 slot, and can fit a full-height card, and use 4x4x4x4 bifurcation, the ASUS Hyper M.2 is really good.

The picture of the GUI at the end is Proxmox.
Proxmox is really powerful and great for a few servers.

Whats the problem?

Each NVMe uses 4 lanes. For each of these x8 slots, they have two NVMes, for a total of 8 lanes.

The x16 slot already has 4x NVMe in it, lol. The other x16 slot has a GPU, which is located in that particular slot due to the lovely 3d-printed fan shroud.

One of the other full-height x8 slots also has a PLX switch, and is loaded with 4 more NVMes.