I'm looking into installing some NVME U.2 drives into my server and wanted to ask the community on lessons they may have learned along the way? I'm in the planning phase and I'm mostly wanting to know what drives are popular among Unraid users?

 

Current plans are:

9500-16i HBA 

I haven't picked out the cables yet but I would like some advice since I think I will need TRI-Mode SFF-8639 cables that are 1M?

Silverstone backplane RAC-BP-304N to support U.2 NVME storage

As for drives, I was hoping other users chime in as to what drives to avoid and what drives are popular to use with Unraid. I'm not sure if there are any know issues with certain drives. i.e. Dell EMC or other OEM branded drives 

 

Model:Custom

M/B:Supermicro H12SSL-I Version 1.02 s/n

BIOS:American Megatrends Inc. Version 3.0 Dated 07/22/2024

CPU:AMD EPYC 7302P 16-Core @ 3000 MHz

HVM:Enabled

IOMMU:Enabled

Cache:L1 Cache: 1 MiB, L2 Cache: 8 MiB, L3 Cache: 128 MiB

Memory:128 GiB DDR4 Multi-bit ECC (max. installable capacity 2048 GiB)

Network:eth0: 10000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500

Kernel:Linux 6.6.68-Unraid x86_64

Since it is a current model, you can find the 9500-16i here, in the documentation section you can find the manual, which describes what cable you need (search for U.2 and it will go right to the cable section). It also has a Storage Adapter Drive Compatibility Report but since that is from 2019, it may or may not help.

 

Unraid generally doesn't care what drives you want to use, but the controller you use might. Backblaze publishes drive reports which may help with reliability, but some good advice is to use different brands, different types, buy them at different times from different stores. Basically, if you buy all the same drives at the same time from the same store, they are likely to be shipped together and made at the same time too, so if one fails, it's pretty much guaranteed the others will fail around the same time too. Of course you should have backups, but that doesn't help much if all your drives keep failing.

9 hours ago, Wody said:

Since it is a current model, you can find the 9500-16i here, in the documentation section you can find the manual, which describes what cable you need (search for U.2 and it will go right to the cable section). It also has a Storage Adapter Drive Compatibility Report but since that is from 2019, it may or may not help.

 

Unraid generally doesn't care what drives you want to use, but the controller you use might. Backblaze publishes drive reports which may help with reliability, but some good advice is to use different brands, different types, buy them at different times from different stores. Basically, if you buy all the same drives at the same time from the same store, they are likely to be shipped together and made at the same time too, so if one fails, it's pretty much guaranteed the others will fail around the same time too. Of course you should have backups, but that doesn't help much if all your drives keep failing.

Thanks for the pointers. I looked at the link and found the 5067-6869 cable should be the correct cable. Two of these cables should give me 8 lanes to each SFF-8654 connection on the backplane. 

 

Quick question; Since I already have a 9400-16i and a Dell H300 (not sure if this one is compatible with NVME drives), is there a NVME enabler cable that will use two of the HBA's SFF-8643 connections into one SFF-8654 (slimSAS) for the backplane? This would use two ports (each with 4 lanes) of the HBA and combine them to give 8 lanes to one SFF-8654 connection. Using two of these cables would provide 16 total lanes to the backplane. I was going through the documentation for the 9400-16i and it only references cables for direct attaching NVME drives and not backplanes. There no sense in buying an HBA if I can use the one I already have. *Fingers crossed*

 

10 hours ago, Wody said:

Backblaze publishes drive reports which may help with reliability, but some good advice is to use different brands, different types, buy them at different times from different stores.

I was really hoping to hear what people are already using in their servers. I'm sure I won't be able to afford the "most reliable" drives on the market. I'm more concerned with compatibility with Unraid. Reason being, last year I bought several PM1633 SAS drives and when I installed them, they were terribly slow and I still haven't been able to figure out why. I'm essentially replacing these drives with NVME U.2 drives.

14 hours ago, peace-keeping-villa8590 said:

Thanks for the pointers. I looked at the link and found the 5067-6869 cable should be the correct cable. Two of these cables should give me 8 lanes to each SFF-8654 connection on the backplane.

The 9400 has its page here and it does have enabler cables, which pinouts are in the manual. I'm not sure how and if they are different on the drive-side. The 9300 (doesn't support NVMe) and the 9400 (and 9500) have a cable guide document here. I can't find a H300, but all the H3xx I did find have chips like the 9300-series or older.

 

SFF-8654 comes in 8i and 4i variants, the 9400 seems to only have 4i cables, the 9500 8i. There's also others than broadcom who make sff-8643 to sff-8654 8i cables, in both SAS/SATA nad NVMe variants which are different, from my understanding though, they don't work as enablers, so you'd need an enabler cable, then some adapter, and then a cable to the backplane, if it uses 8i. Cables are a big mess. If only we had U.3 backplanes already, then all those issues would go away.

 

Apparently the PM1633 has firmware issues, like the 32k bug, so I'd check firmware. Also they support different sector-sizes, so you'd want to make sure they are formatted as 512 per sector, not 520 or something like that. They may also have encryption, which shouldn't be an issue, but could affect performance.

 

My server is more traditional with ST10000NM0096 drives and an M.2 for cache, currently on a 9500, before I ran a 9400 with a SATA SSD as cache. The backup-server has a 9600 with about a dozen drives, with HGST Ultrastar 8TB SAS being the biggest, the rest are old sata-drives.

 

Edit: Also found this knowledge base article about cables which seems more recent and has some tips.

 

 

Edited March 4, 20251 yr by Wody

On 3/4/2025 at 1:56 AM, Wody said:

Apparently the PM1633 has firmware issues, like the 32k bug, so I'd check firmware. Also they support different sector-sizes, so you'd want to make sure they are formatted as 512 per sector, not 520 or something like that. They may also have encryption, which shouldn't be an issue, but could affect performance.

I'm aware of the 32k hour firmware issue. All the drives I have are functional. Some of them have over 32k hours and some don't. They all report good health.