Enabling Gen5 SSD Evaluations with Serial Cables

Testing and reviewing SSDs has a new set of complexities with every interface update or form factor change. Never have these challenges been more prevalent than right now as the industry transitions not just to Gen5 SSDs, but also to the most diverse set of SSD form factors ever.

Testing and reviewing SSDs has a new set of complexities with every interface update or form factor change. Never have these challenges been more prevalent than right now as the industry transitions not just to Gen5 SSDs, but also to the most diverse set of SSD form factors ever.

In the realm of Gen4 SSDs, we pretty much just saw M.2 and U.2 SSDs. U.2 SSDs generally always showed up in a 15mm case, but there were a few from time to time, especially Samsung, who used the 7mm case. As far as diversity of form factors that was pretty much it. To be fair, we did review one set of E1.S EDSFF SSDs, but that review was an outlier. With EDSFF picking up major steam now, not just with hyperscalers but with all server vendors, the game is changing and so must the test equipment.

That’s where Serial Cables comes in, providing critical infrastructure to our lab when it comes to evaluating Gen5 SSDs. Our core test platform is a Dell PowerEdge R760 with U.2 bays in the front. But, Dell only supports Gen4 drives with their U.2 backplane, opting to only support Gen5 with the E3.S backplane. Already you can start to see the issues in standardizing our SSD review testbed. And this isn’t just a Dell issue, Lenovo, HPE, Supermicro, and others are all making design decisions that make it nearly impossible to have one test platform for all SSDs.

What Serial Cables did was create a Gen5 JBOF with modular trays that can adapt to any form factor. The 8-bay unit is paired with a host card, cabling, and a series of “paddle cards” to mount drives in. And with the exception of a few oddball drive shapes like the massive E.1L SSDs, the trays accommodate most of what we need to test, really well. This means with a single modern server, we can test any Gen5 SSD in the exact same way.

Serial Cables Gen5 Equipment

As noted, this Gen5 testing suite includes several pieces of Serial Cables equipment:

• PCIe Gen5 x16 MCIO Host Card
• Gen5 PCIO 8 Bay E3 Passive JBOF
• Gen5 PCIe U.2 Paddle Card
• Gen5 PCIe M.2 Paddle Card

PCIe Gen5 x16 MCIO Host Card

The host card comes with a Broadcom Atlas2 PCIe switch. It has 4 MCIO receptacles each offering a x4 connection to directly connect various PCIe devices. We utilize this card inside the Dell PowerEdge R760 to externally connect to the Serial Cables JBOF. The card goes for $3,995.00.

The card itself has a FHHL footprint, allowing broad compatibility with most servers. For systems that only support half-height cards, they do offer a similar offering in that form factor. From the system side no drivers are required, making installation simple regardless of the OS.

PCIe Gen5 8 Bay E3 Passive JBOF

The core of this system is the Serial Cables Gen5 PCIe 8-bay E3 Passive JBOD universal test platform. This JBOF supports E3, U.2, U.3, and M.2 form factors, with a common EDSFF backplane. Gen5 SSDs are more complicated than previous generations of SSDs due to the vast amount of shapes and sizes they come in. Fortunately, this Gen5 JBOF is geared toward accommodating this issue since it can support many different types of drives.

The JBOF has a total of eight bays, meaning we could test larger groups of SSD if we like, or multiples without having to swap drives around. An out-of-band management function is built into the JBOD for basic operations such as enabling or disabling slots, as well as diagnostic functions. This device has a list price of $2,995.00.

PCIe Gen5 U.2, U.3 & M.2 Paddle Cards

These paddle cards are compatible with the JBOF and go for a list price of $75.00. We currently leverage both the U.2/U.3, E3DSFF, and M.2 paddle cards inside the JBOD for enterprise and consumer PCIe Gen5 reviews.

Final Thoughts

Overall the Serial Cables PCIe Gen5 host card and JBOF combo has become a fantastic integral component of the StorageReview lab and enable us to test a wide range of emerging flash products on a singular test platform. This allows us to have repeatable performance reporting, which is fundamental to presenting reliable data.

While this rig clearly isn’t made for the mass market, any lab like us that tests a wide variety of drives already knows the Serial Cables name. They’ve made adapter cards for many years that are mainstays in many testing environments. This Gen5 JBOD rig is yet another great tool and one we’ll be relying on for the duration of our Gen5 SSD testing. You can see the latest results using this test rig in our Memblaze PBlaze7 review.

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