DC P4600 Issues and update

[chrcoluk]

Got an update here.

My first 2TB SSD great deal

Wont name the retailer so I dont look like an advert, but snagged their last one, 2TB for £110 is good anyway, but this is datacentre SSD usually 4 figures, Intel DC P4600 2TB brand new. It is a PCIe SSD so luckily I have an older board that hasnt had all its slots replaced by M.2.

www.techpowerup.com

I been looking for a way to turn of the hugely distracting big green RGB light at back of drive.

Not only have I failed but something alarming about Intel's support.

They have removed software related to this SSD from their website and moved the support to a company called solidigm. That websites states support ended Feb 2023.

The firmware update tool says drive is no longer supported. But in that tool there is no options for the lighting anyway.

I rang Intel which took some serious effort to speak to someone related to these products, and I asked how their product warranty works, they initially claimed its from date of purchase but then changed to from date of product release when I brought up their abandonware, I reminded them that breaches UK and EU laws, I was put on hold, and the story changed to the hardware is supported against failure but software support has ended.

So that explains how I got such a low price, no way to update the firmware, and will need to tape over the bright green light.

If this ever fails, I expect an RMA to be extremely difficult.

 

[chrcoluk]

Seems not so great deal now.

I lost a lot of time today on this so a quick summary.

Did image backup of my 970 EVO to replace it with the Intel SSD so I would have another TB of nand storage on this machine.

I put the DC P4600 in the same PCIE slot the 970 EVO was occupying (970 EVO is using a PCIE adaptor for convenience).

Read speeds no where near expected levels were varying between about 500 and 1200 in diskmark.

Put it back in AMD machine back to circa 3300.

Partition is aligned.

Tried forcing PCIE slot in main PC to gen 3, no difference, tried different PCIE slot, one linked to cpu directly, no difference. Crystal diskinfo does report it as having 4 lanes, gen 3 x 4.

So seems some kind of weird compatibility issue, so I will have to find a use for it in the AMD machine. 970 EVO is back in this machine now.

I have also found a list on the solidigm website and the SSD does have the latest firmware.

 

[chrcoluk]

More twists, its back in main rig now as I decided I wanted more SSD scratch storage, the 970 EVO may also be in here as well when I do my platform upgrade since I will have extra capacity to add more nvme drives.

Some discoveries.

The drive is spec'd very high on watts (even higher than the recent gen 5 drive reviewed on here) but there was no idle power specs.

My second machine which runs proxmox/nas after has a watt meter in use, after I did the swap the idle power went up by 3 watts, so basically at idle this uses 3 watts more than a 970 EVO, which for an SSD is significant. The new setup will save a little as that second machine is on 24/7 and this is now only on when I use it.

Also I discovered the low sequential read speeds on here matches when I do a single queued read test on the AMD, so the issue seems to be queueing not working on this machine, I will retest when I upgrade the platform.

However this isnt that important as I dont actually run games of the drive, the 970 EVO replaced a HDD when I did my storage changes a while back, and I will be moving ntlite image work from a hdd to it and some video editing, both previously done on spindles, so the benefit is the extra 1.1TB and even with it being slow at single threaded workloads vs modern SSDs it will be an upgrade to the workflow on it.

I also compared it to my 860 EVO in the same machine, a SATA SSD. The 860 EVO out matches it on single threaded 4k, and things like chkdsk and trim are slower on the intel. The SSD clearly optimised for highly threaded i/o datacentre type use.

Finally its using 16k clusters to match the page size which does bump the sequential by 50% on reads single threaded.

 

[evernessince]

That's normal for enterprise class SSDs and I'd expect load power draw to be higher as well.

 

[bonehead123]

#JustSayNo2IntelConsumerStorageFAILS#

Been there, done that, NEVER AGAIN !

 

[chrcoluk]

That's normal for enterprise class SSDs and I'd expect load power draw to be higher as well.

Definitely, but load isnt as important as 99% of time its idle.

 

[chrcoluk]

Results back to normal on 13700k system (same as AMD).

I also ran the new DirectStorage benchmark on this drive, lets just say its interesting, and goes to show the difference that can be had designing a drive for datacentres vs consumer use.

Download link here for the benchmark.

DirectStorage 1.2 Benchmark, with GPU Decompression, released

This DirectStorage 1.2 Benchmark will give you an idea of what your storage devices are capable of, so we suggest giving it a go.

www.dsogaming.com

On the DC P4600 it takes over 7 seconds to load the 5 gig of data.

On my 980 Pro on the other hand it is 0.27 seconds.

This test was ran on Windows 10 21H2 so shows DS games should not need to be exclusive to Win11.

 

[iameatingjam]

Hello,

Not sure if having 2 TB SSD/NVME is a good idea,

as storing huge amount of data on SSD/NVME may be risky, because they can develop silent data corruption (no alarm signs, until you try to create backup image, or run SMART self tests, see the thread of Samsung 870 EVO series).

I suggest no to store important data on SSD/NVME, just put the OS, games files, things where speed launch matters the most.

I have 500 GB and 1 TB SSDs, they are used for OS, games, and some files that I can re-download in case of SSD crash.
For important data I still use hard disks.

Perhaps I will change my mind if important progress are made for flash memory technology.

Well I suppose its just an anecdote but I have had the exact opposite experience, lots of hdd failures, but none from an ssd. My very first ssd some kingston drive I bought around 2013 was still running in 2022 when I sold the machine though it had slowed down a bit.

afaik, its still running today as I checked in with the buyer to make sure the system was running smooth not too long ago. I even run a 3 year old ssd in raid 0. Haven't had a problem with that one either. With so many users, and brands and other variables, I don't think we can rely on any one person's experience to get a bigger picture on the situation. Maybe there's been some studies done? Idk. Would be interesting to see.

 

[Deleted member 232534]

Hello,

Not sure if having 2 TB SSD/NVME is a good idea,

as storing huge amount of data on SSD/NVME may be risky, because they can develop silent data corruption (no alarm signs, until you try to create backup image, or run SMART self tests, see the thread of Samsung 870 EVO series).

I suggest no to store important data on SSD/NVME, just put the OS, games files, things where speed launch matters the most.

I have 500 GB and 1 TB SSDs, they are used for OS, games, and some files that I can re-download in case of SSD crash.
For important data I still use hard disks.

Perhaps I will change my mind if important progress are made for flash memory technology.

agree SSD fail is usually more catastrophic than HDD. There are no symptoms like bad sectors at first or strange sounds.

 

[csendesmark]

agree SSD fail is usually more catastrophic than HDD. There are no symptoms like bad sectors at first or strange sounds.

Dropping number or reserved sectors are a good sign to predict an impending failure, and in my case with my original Samsung 980PRO expected to die for months.
I also use a monitoring tool, namely HDD Sentinel (yeah, when the program's v1.0 been created, there were no SSDs in commercial use, not for a decade )
Anyway, I recommend to use this, or a similar program to check the S.M.A.R.T. statuses of your drivers.

 

[Kapone33]

To be honest the only flash I had fail consistently was Kingston USB drives. I have never had a NVME die on me. I even dropped an ADATA 8100 512GB drive in the rain (a year ago) and today it works just fine. It would appear that some specific Samsung drives do exhibit this phenomenon though. I have never bought a Samsung drive though so there is that.

Hello,

Not sure if having 2 TB SSD/NVME is a good idea,

as storing huge amount of data on SSD/NVME may be risky, because they can develop silent data corruption (no alarm signs, until you try to create backup image, or run SMART self tests, see the thread of Samsung 870 EVO series).

I suggest no to store important data on SSD/NVME, just put the OS, games files, things where speed launch matters the most.

I have 500 GB and 1 TB SSDs, they are used for OS, games, and some files that I can re-download in case of SSD crash.
For important data I still use hard disks.

Perhaps I will change my mind if important progress are made for flash memory technology.

I have 2 MX500s in RAID 0 and it is rock solid. I also have 2 different RAID 0 NVME cards that are also rock solid. The only problem I have run into with NVVME (Not SSD) is how integrated to the OS Win11 makes NVME. A Hard Disk is only perceived to be better but I have Intel 660Ps that are still at 99% life. The 870 Evo is the only SSD that has those issues as even the budget ones are good. I have built plenty of RAID 0 NAND based on SSD and NVME and not had one single issue from any client based on storage.

 

[chrcoluk]

Have had some kingston SSD's fail, in 2 of the 3 cases just flat out failure, cant be read, detected etc. The 3rd one is still usable but gets silent corruption now when used (m.sata). All 3 cases no warning on SMART. Sorry I like there is my 4th kingston also which is misbehaving had to remove from xbox series S as it was reporting full, unable to write files when was almost empty, very strange issue but was unable to fix.

Also just remembered had 2 MX 500's fail, I did eventually get replacements for them but had to keep pushing crucial, they were the one's I reported on here with super high erase cycle's the replacements on the newer revision seem fine. One now used in xbox series S for clips/screenshots and the other is sitting next to me spare.

I have only in the past decade's had one hdd failure (before drive retired). Didnt lose data. My WD black and raptor drives from circa 3 decades ago still work perfect even after long periods of being shut down. Any other failures I have had have only really come after drive was put on a shelf then after period of time trying to use again, samsung, wd green, and a seagate drive come to mind. I currently am using two 7 year old WD RED drives in my NAS (which I forgot to put in my sig). All the bad drives mentioned had issues on SMART so SMART did its job.

I think what contributes to this is I always cool my spindles, and have historically kept systems on 24/7 so no power cycles and no spin down on idle. So interesting for me much higher failure rate on SSD's albeit only two on normal sku's, the kingstons were extremely cheap.

 

[Tomgang]

I dont understand people having trouble with SSD. I was an early adoptor of SSD´s. Been on the Wagon since 2011. My first SSD was an Crucial C300 64 GB and have since then had around 20 drives over the years. No SSD´s has failed on me while a few HDD has and either has any SSD given me trouble. Maybe i am just lucky. I only go after Crucial and Samsung, the only i trully trust.

I even had a Samsung 950 PRO fully working on my old X58 systrem as boot drive for 4 years un til replacing it.

Right now i have 3 Samsung 980 PRO 1/2 TB NVMe ssd and 2 sata SSDs (Crucial MX300 2 TB + Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB) in my current system. Been going trouble free for 2 years now.

Well back in the early days of SSD, one of my friend was trully unlucky with ocz agility 3. 3 died in a row nearly immediately after getting them, mostly because of the back then very unreliable sandforce controller.

Today however in my opinion SSD´s very reliable and more so than a HDD.

 

[iameatingjam]

To be honest the only flash I had fail consistently was Kingston USB drives. I have never had a NVME die on me. I even dropped an ADATA 8100 512GB drive in the rain (a year ago) and today it works just fine. It would appear that some specific Samsung drives do exhibit this phenomenon though. I have never bought a Samsung drive though so there is that.


I have 2 MX500s in RAID 0 and it is rock solid. I also have 2 different RAID 0 NVME cards that are also rock solid. The only problem I have run into with NVVME (Not SSD) is how integrated to the OS Win11 makes NVME. A Hard Disk is only perceived to be better but I have Intel 660Ps that are still at 99% life. The 870 Evo is the only SSD that has those issues as even the budget ones are good. I have built plenty of RAID 0 NAND based on SSD and NVME and not had one single issue from any client based on storage.

I have some sata ssds in raid 0, and one of them is 3 years old. I've had no issues with it yet. The smart data still says 99% life. Though I know they generally fail before hitting 0 ( or so I've heard)