In this post I’ll be reviewing the IOCREST IO-PEX40152, providing information on how to buy, benchmarks, installation, configuration and more! I’ve also posted tons of pics for your viewing pleasure. I installed this card in an HPE DL360p Gen8 server to add NVME capabilities to create an NVMe based Storage Server. To get exact numbers, I may possibly write up another blog post in the future when I can connect some SSDs to test the controllers max speed. At this time I don’t have any immediately available. Traditional drives typically used 512k physical sector sizes. Newer hard drives and SSDs use 4k sectors, but often emulate 512k logical sectors (called 512e) for compatibility. SSD’s specifically sometimes ship with 512e to increase compatibility with operating systems and the ability to clone your old drive to the new SSD during migrations. For step 6, we need to modify the /etc/fstab entry for the root fs. It is different depending on whether you’re using Ubuntu or Raspbian.

Open the /etc/network/interfaces file, and add the following line so that the Pi only get’s an IP once during boot: Make sure before installing the heatsink cover that you remove the blue plastic film on the heat transfer material between NVME and heatsink, and the PEX chip and heatsink. Supposedly w680 mobo can do this. But I can’t get my hands on one. And it might just be 2-2(from chipset) and not 4x4 from cpu. NFS VM datastore is used for testing as the host running the FreeNAS VM has the NFS datastore store mounted on itself.

IOCrest

While the ML310e Gen8 v2 server is a cheap low entry server, it’s been a fantastic team member of my homelab. When I first loaded this up on my VDI environment, the software instantly detected the Nvidia GRID card, and asked me if it could use it. From that point on the preview window was fluid, transitions and add-ins were rendered on the fly during previewing, and the final production encoding was literally over 20 times faster using 1080p. Keep in mind this VM only has one Nvidia K180q profile attached to it, so I’m only using less than 25% of the cards full capability. Other benefits to video editing and encoding on VDI The reason why I did this was to test the new version out, and attempt to increase both throughput and redundancy in my environment. For power I disconnected the DVD-ROM (who uses those anyways, right?), and connected the LP5 splitter and the LP5 to 6pin power adapter. I finally hooked it up to the card.

This is a fantastic card that you can use reliably if you have a system with a free x16 slot. Because of the fact it has a built in PCIe switch and doesn’t require PCIe bifurcation, you can confidently use it knowing it will work.

Customer reviews

The computers accessing the NVMe Storage Server would include VMware ESXi hosts, Raspberry Pi SBCs, and of course Windows Computers and Workstations. Boot Support– Installing this card in different systems, I noticed that all of them allowed me to boot from the disks connected to the IO-PCE585-5I.