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Spring has sprung here in Maine, so it's time to clean some computer equipment.

Today, we're going to start with Jennay, my HP DL380 G9 which acts as the primary server on my network for both production and lab uses. After shutting down the lab VMs and migrating the production VMs to a temporary host, the cleaning could commence! This box had 120 days uptime prior to being taken down, which is pretty good for me.

First, we have to clean the top of the server itself, which tends to take the role of a sort of shelf in my rack. Mostly a junk shelf. It also holds our cable modem, an external hard drive, two Pis with GPS clock duties, and the UPS for the network gear. The cables on this stuff are all long enough that they can be moved aside without being powered down.

And now it's clean!

Don't forget to install your UPS-supporting cat food container.

Then we can take it outside and get a closer look at what we have. Lots of buildup on these side vents by the power supplies.

Using the shopvac with the hose connected on the back to blow (it was moved after this photo) in conjunction with a firm paintbrush to get more stubborn dust out of there.

It's really not that bad inside, but there are a few corners where there's bad accumulation, and a fine surface layer over everything that will just get worse over time.

Again, it's hard to tell, but it's MUCH cleaner now. Especially everything around the fans, they were caked with very fine dust.

The second goal with taking this server down was to add a small fan to the onboard HBA controller. It is regularly the hottest point in the system, usually between 52ºC and 55ºC. The larger part of the heatsink is almost perfectly 40mm on each side, and there is a 12v powerpoint nearby on the PCIe riser.

It's a good fit, and there were metal tabs on the ends of the wires that allowed them to snugly fit into the large 12v connector.

I also used a very small amount of hot glue on the front and rear edges to tack it into place.

Works great!

This modification brought the temperature of the onboard RAID chip down to 42ºC - it's still one of the warmest components, but a 10º drop is significant, and should lower the thermal stress on it significantly. The next time I take the server down I may remove the module and replace the thermal interface material between the controller and heatsink.

The important parts back in place, all the other junk is in a box on the floor. Here's to another 120 days!

For the past few monts GNSS-disciplined time servers have been taking up a large percentage of my hobby time. Building and distribuiting the TimeHat went very well, and it gave me a bit of extra capital to dig into a few things that I might not have been able to otherwise, like picking up some "real" GNSS timing modules! The unit I was most interested in was the Nokia FYGM, a GNSS timing receiver made to work with Nokia cell site equipment. The FYGM has a u-blox LEA-M8T, one of the better timing-focused u-blox modules available. Lots of people buy these (and other) timing modules from decomissioned cell sites through Chinese scrappers and recyclers just to harvest the receiver, but I wanted to keep them as "together" as possible.

Unlike typical hobbyist GNSS modules, the FYGM has a some extra hardware on it, namely an 8051 MCU. I have more information on this on the wiki, here, so I'll keep this short. To start, why not simply emancipate the M8T from this board? I have a few reasons:

• I don't want to design a new carrier for the M8T
• The original board has high quality power supplies for the M8T and active antenna
• It also provides excellent antenna protection circuitry
• The included aluminium case is really nice
• The status LEDs (driven by the MCU) are useful
• Once the board boots, it's not hard to get the MCU out of our way

That MCU, the 8051, started as being the biggest thorn in my side. Before I had one of these units in my hands all I had to go off of was ebay listing pictures and a couple of posts on the TimeNuts mailing list, but that was enough to get started. In addition to antenna input, the FYGM has one other connector - a 12 pin DIN amphenol-looking thing. Thankfully all of the FYGMs I have found for sale inclide a completed cable to mate with this (using an HDMI connector on the host device end, with CAT7 as the cable itself), otherwise this connector could be a real pain to deal with, becuase it's not an amphenol, or anything that seems to be generally available. Only 8 of the pins on this connector are used, Ground, DC in (taking anywhere from 12 to 35v), and then three RS422 differential pairs for Tx, Rx, and PPS. Two RS422 transceivers on the bottom of the module provide this signaling. My initial intention was to try and use these as-is, so I got some hardware to work with RS422 - more on that later.

Once I got an FYGM in my hands, I started tracing all of the connectors and headers. I was disappointed to learn that the RS422 transeivers' input does not come directly from the M8T, but rather it from the 8051. This meant that it probably wouldn't be spitting out UART signals directly from M8T, something that turned out to be true. On the bright side, the four pin connector adjacent to the M8T is, in fact, UART directly from the M8T, meaning that bypassing the 8051 seemed like a possibility, and it technically still is. The ten pin connector next ot the 8051 is a programming and debugging header for that device, so perhaps one day I can read its configuration out or even reprogram it to make it more useful to me. The more immediate use that header has is the exposed reset pin - dropping a jumper between it and ground causes the 8051 to not boot at all, so through the UART pins next to the M8T I can interface with it directly, and completely ignore the MCU. I didn't end up doing this though.

Why?

Well, to put it plainly, the engineers who developed this thing had some clue as to what they were doing - remember, this device is intended to be a highly precise GNSS time source for a clock in a cell site. If we can benefit from the work they put into developing this thing, why not? When the FYGM boots, the 8051 sends a number of strings to the M8T to put it into a configuration that makes it optimal for use in its intended purpose - which just happens to be the purpose I have for it! As far as I have been able to tell, once these strings are sent, the 8051 gets out of the way entirely, it simply takes UART from the M8T, process it, and spits it out over R422. Initially this was a disappointment, but... I don't need to use the RS422 - I can run the signals straight from that UART header to the host - and that's exactly what I ended up doing.

Early on I had started to design a Pi Hat with an HDMI port, a DC in jack for 12-35v, a 5v power supply for the Pi, and RS422 transeivers for the UART and PPS signals. As much as I like the aesthetic of this, it's just not reasonably feasible. Seeing as the UART from the M8T isn't connected directly to the RS422 transeiver on the FYGM, I would have to connect them directly with some bodge wires, but this means that the 8051 has to be taken out of the loop, and for the reasons described above, I don't want to do that anymore. What I ended up doing is pulling the pins out of the eight pin JST connector, everything but ground and DC in, and I am connecting to them directly to the UART signals out of the M8T. This also lets me do some sneaky stuff. It's kind of ugly, but it works well and allows me to continue to use the DIN connector which is solastic'd in place.

Again, this is ugly - but it works. If you look closely you can see the sneakyness... As you can probably tell from the picture at the top of this post, what I have done is cut the included cable down to about a foot and run it straight onto one of the TimeHat boards, feeding in Tx, Rx, and PPS just as the MAX-M8Q modules do. Power comes in through that barrel jack zip tied to the cable. If you look closetly, though, you'll see something going to the 5v pins of the TimeHat, what's up with that? Well, I spent a while think about how best to handle powering this whole mess, and I really liked the idea of integrating the Pi and FYGM as closely as possible. The UART header on the FYGM has a pin for 3v3 input, so I could power the M8T directly. The 8051 and active antenna circuits have their power power regulators though, these are fed from 6.3v coming from the main power supply on the board.

The Pi has no easy way to source 6.3v, but you know what? Turns out it will run just fine on 6.3v! I haven't spent much time at all studying the power front end on the Pi, so I just threw 6.3v on the 5v rail and sure enough, it works just fine! This may very well impact something in a negative light, but I'm just going to let it roll for now - I'll update if it causes any problems, but I don't suspect that it will. Basically, what I'm doing is feeing 16v into the FYGM's main power supply, then pulling the 6.3v back out and into the 5v rail on the Pi along with the other signals mentioned earlier. How much power is safe to sync from this 6.3v rail? Probably not a lot - but - keep in mind that I have the Pis that I use in this role configured for very low power consumption - no WiFi, no BT, no GPU, no USB devices, and the CPU is clocked down about as low as it can go. Using a kill-a-watt, I measured the whole setup to pull a whopping 1.9 watts from the wall, including all the power supply overhead.

What does this mean as far as time server performance is concerned? Well, I don't know yet. I haven't done much of that measuring yet. I just recently got my GNSS antenna splitter, so I can finally start to compare receivers using the same signal source, which is a step in the right direction. What really needs to happen next, before I can start seriously start making this measurements, is getting a GNSS antenna mounted up above the roof line. I have my mast built and brackets in place, all that's left is to actually attach it to the house - I'm still working on figuring that out, more to come shortly, I hope.

That said, even in my "less than optimal" configuration, things are looking good. The Pi here is a Pi2, and that is on purpose. Can pairing a less-than-optimal Pi with a really good GNSS receiver help? Who knows! Here's what the chronyc sources output looks like at the moment:

And here's what cgps looks like:

The 0.35 TDOP is what really stands out here. This receiver's antenna is in the basement, sitting on the ledge of a casement window. Using a high-mounted helical antenna sticking out of a 2nd story window I have seen TDOP below 0.2, so I expect this to improve well beyond the capabilities of the Pi once I get it mounted on the side of the house.

Last night, I traded my iPad Pro for a Huawei MateBook X Pro (2018) (hereafter "matebook") and now I'm going to spend some time comparing this laptop to my current laptop, a Panasonic Let's Note CF-SV8 (hereafter "SV8"). Both machines are very similar in some ways and incredibly different in others, so I thought I might take the opportunity to write a little bit about this. This is not a review of either machine and is probably a bit premature as I've had the SV8 for a few months and the matebook only a few hours.

Lets start with the objective boring stuff, the specs.

So, what does this tell us? Well, these are both "thin and light" medium/high class machines from 2018, though their target audiences are very different. The SV8 isn't even sold in the US, and is targeted squarely at Japanese businessmen wanting a high end and very practical Windows laptop with good connectivity and great battery life. The matebook, on the otherhand, is sold worldwide and is targeted at people who want a Mac but want to run Windows on it for slightly less than Apple prices. It's a high end machine, but not really suitable for "traditional business use" and it suffers from the port-deletes found on most similar thin and light laptops today.

Aside from the differences in CPU and RAM (which, I think it's worth mentioning - the SV8 is available in an i7/16 config, and the matebook is available in an i5/8 config) the largest difference between the two from a hardware perspective is that the SV8 has an integral full-size optical drive, which, for a 12" laptop in 2018, is nothing short of incredible. It's not something I need or use, and in fact I have it disabled in the BIOS, but I can understand how some see the appeal. Optical drive delete models exist and are approx. 100g lighter, but they don't seem to be very common. Additionally, the matebook includes a dedicated Nvidia MX150 GPU. This is a GPU suitable for "light gaming" (eSports Titles and the like) and something I would just as soon not have. It's not possible to disable entirely in the BIOS, but it's trivial to do so in both Windows and Linux. Doing so, of course, increases battery life. Personally, I find the inclusion of a dGPU for occasional 3D tasks to be more beneficial than an optical drive. I can plug in a USB optical drive, but eGPUs are decidedly more of a pain.

I don't use a laptop as my primary machine, so lots of RAM and a powerful CPU are much less relevant to me. The SV8 has performed every task I have cared to throw at it handily, and while I haven't done as much on the matebook, I expect it to perform just as well. I have benchmarked both machines, both with Geekbench 5.3.1 and an xz compression test if the reader is interested in raw numbers.

Both machines have beautiful screens. The matebook's panel is glossy, however, because it's also a touch screen, which is not something I care for. I don't mind glossy panels, but I know that some hate them. I rarely, if ever, use a computer outdoors, and I try and avoid situations with bright overhead lighting when I can. 3000x2000 at 13.9" on the matebook is far too high a DPI for me to use at 100%, but 200% is too large. 150% feels just right in windows, but fractional scaling suffers considerably under linux, and may even be impossible when using the Nvidia GPU. I would prefer to run my display at 100% under all circumstances, but on the matebook it's just not possible for me without reading glasses. The SV8's panel, by comparison, is 1920x1200 at 12.1", and I find it very usable at 100%. There are times when my eyes are a bit more "tired" and focusing on the smaller characters is a bit of a struggle, but this can quickly be resolved by blowing up my web browser or terminal to 125-150%. Both panels are better than a typical 1920x1080 display due to the added vertical height. The matebook is 3:2 and the SV8 is 3.2:2. Both are wonderful, but the added height on the matebook wins for me.

On the question of input devices, it's no question that the matebook wins for me. The keyboard is wider with larger keys, and it has a more standard American layout that I am used to elsewhere. The keys have good travel and feel, and nothing wobbles or bends when typing. It's not the SV8's fault for having a JIS keyboard, as it is a machine primarily sold in Japan, rather it's my fault for using a JIS keyboard in an American layout. The SV8's keyboard has many keys that are specific to inputting Japanese text, which are unused by me, and I would prefer they not be there at all to make the other keys larger. There is a configuration of the SV8 that is sold in Singapore which has an American style keyboard, but I have not been able to find one of these yet. I also suspect if I had smaller hands I would like the SV8's keyboard more. The SV8 keyboard does win out in a few ways, though: it has a contextual menu key, which I use daily, it has dedicated Insert/Delete keys (the matebook only has delete), and the arrow keys are in the "normal" inverted-T configuration, rather than the mushed macbook-style that the matebook adopted. The feel of the SV8 keyboard is "fine", on the mushier side but not bad. It also feels very rigidly affixed to the case. The matebook's is also backlit, which I appreciate; the SV8's is not.

I almost always use a bluetooth mouse when using a laptop on a table, but I'll use the trackpad plenty around the house or when traveling. The matebook has a gigantic glass covered trackpad, much in Apple's style, and it feels great and is very responsive. The SV8's trackpad is also very responsive, and it's unique circular shape is interesting, but it is very small, which can be frustrating at times. The dedicated buttons of the SV8 are nice, but missing them on the matebook isn't a dealbreaker. Something I wish both had was the ability to turn off the trackpad from a function key. If I'm using a mouse, I often don't want any input from the trackpad.

The matebook's thinness causes it to loose the I/O battle without question. A single USB3-A, two USB-C (one of which is TB3) and a headset jack. That's it. Not even an SD card slot. The SV8 on the other hand comes in with a full compliment - three USB3-As, a USB-C for TB3, HDMI and VGA, ethernet, and a dedicated barrel jack for power. The SV8 also has a full compliment of indicator LEDs: power status, lock keys, and activity of HDD and SD while the matebook only has a charging LED on the side. USB-C charging is an option for both machines - the matebook requires it with no alternative, and the SV8 supports it as long as the machine is either running or in standby. For some reason it won't charge from USB-C if it's powered off - I haven't figured out why. Both support Windows Hello if you're into that sort of thing - the SV8 has the IR camera while the matebook has a fingerprint reader on the power button. I don't use either. The webcams on both are good, though the SV8's is clearly better, full 1080p. The matebook's is 720, and it pops up out of the keyboard between the F6 and F7 keys, which is a very peculiar feature. It does enable the screen area on the matebook to completely fill the lid, which is very attractive. The matebook has fairly full-sounding speakers which can be incredibly loud, which is something I find frustrating. In Windows I find the 10-15 volume level to be appropriate. The SV8's speakers are "fine" but definitely not something I would want to use for listening to music, contrary to the matebook. I haven't used the microphones on either, but I imagine they're both pretty bad, but acceptable in a pinch.

I don't know how Huawei's batteries track over time, but I don't have a tremendous amount of confidence in it's long term capacity. The SV8, on the other hand, I expect to retain near-original capacity for years, as has been reported by other Let's Note owners. Panasonic is just really good at batteries, go figure. I have never needed to go more than about 5 hours on a charge, and both machines will do so easily. The 43 watt hour battery in the SV8 is reported to last up to 13 hours under light duty loads, and I can believe that. The matebook is advertised as lasting 12 hours, which I do not believe. Reviewers have placed it at the seven to nine hour mark, which as I have stated is plenty enough for me. I don't know if I will be able to get a replacement for either, should I ever need one.

So, aesthetics. The matebook is boring. Lots of people will probably find it to be very sexy and attractive, but it's just a 13" MacBook Pro clone. It does a good job being a MacBook clone in that it feels very solid and the fit and finish is excellent. Pretty, but boring. The SV8 on the other hand is a cute little pragmatic powerhouse that many people find to be tremendously ugly. It's true that the aesthetics of Let's Note laptops haven't changed significantly in 20 years, but Panasonic is clearly taking a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to their laptop design, and I am thoroughly okay with that. The chassis is composed entirely of magnesium, so it's very strong and light. The lid has an interesting wavy design in the top that is designed to distribute weight that might otherwise crack the display. When you pick up the SV8 you are immediately surprised at how light it is, and you suspect it's made of thin plastic like a netbook, but it's not! The SV8 also has a top mounted hinge, which I greatly prefer to the matebook's macbook-style wrap-around hinge. The matebook is "sleeker" though - thinner with no protrusions. The SV8 is much thicker, and the way the battery and feet stick out from the bottom causes them to often get caught on something when taking it in or out of a bag. Additionally, the strange footprint and thickness of the SV8 makes finding a suitable small sleeve or case a challenge, whereas the matebook is much more of a generic 13" laptop.

Conclusion? I don't have one yet. They're both good laptops, and for the foreseeable future I'll continue to use both in varying roles. I look forward to traveling with both when Global Pandemic is over as I would like to have more time with each on the road. I can see the SV8 being more of a desk queen, living beside my desktop in a very dignified role. The matebook, on the other hand, is a beater - if it falls off a table or my daughter spills chocolate milk on it, well, that's why I have an accidental damage rider for laptops and tablets on my homeowners insurance. I do not know if it would be possible for me to get another SV8.

A couple of weeks ago I found a very reasonably priced iMac G4 being sold locally, and having always been somewhat interested in them (and having never had one before) I decided to get in touch with the seller and go pick it up. What I ended up getting was a fantastic condition first generation iMac G4/800. It has a few minor scuffs and marks on it here and there, but nothing a couple of alcohol wipes couldn't take care of.

What has kept me away from iMac G4s in the past has been the fact that, by and large, they are OS X only machines. I have very little interest in PPC OS X as it largely still feels too new to be "retro" and yet is too slow and incompatible to be used for much. I tinker with it from time to time, but System 7 and Mac OS 8 and 9 are where most of my interest lies. Only the first revision of the first generation of iMac G4 could run 9, and even then only it's special version of 9.2.2 (which is not hard to find), but that is good enough for me. I decided to take a gamble on this particular machine because 1) it was very cheap, 2) it looked to be in good condition, and 3) it was a 15", and all of the first gen iMac G4s were 15", so there was a chance that this one was a first gen. Reading the service manual I also learned that not only is the first gen the only generation to be able to boot natively into 9, but only machines with serial numbers less than xx305xxxxxx will as well. This machine is in the xx200 range, so it should boot 9 just fine. It's also the highest end first generation model sold - with the 800MHz CPU, 60GB HDD, and Superdrive. It was also factory upgraded to 512MB with a single PC133 DIMM, leaving the SO-DIMM slot vacant. The airport slot is also surprisingly empty, but that's not really a problem for me as I have little interest in WEP encrypted 802.11b.

Now, the bad news. Unfortunately this particular machine has screen issues. Particularly, the "white screen of death" that seems to be not entirely uncommon when researching these machines. This one in particular boots as one would normally expect when the power button is pressed - it chmes, the fan spins up, if an HDD or CD with OS loaded is present you can hear it begin to boot - but the screen is forever white. When it first kicks on the screen is more of a gray, in fact it's the same gray that you would expect for a machine of this era's first image (all of my G4s do it too) but instead of showing a happy mac, or the "OS not found" symbols, within a few seconds it transitions to a bright white. One way I know that the machine is booting is that I am able to enter open firmware and use commands to shut down, reboot, and eject the optical drive tray. This is good news, as it tells me that the motherboard works properly, and when I hear it booting from the HDD or optical drive I know that the IDE bus works as well.

I don't know which part is causing the problem, but I have been able to narrow it down to one of three things: the video connector on the motherboard (very unlikely), the video cable that runs from the board, up the neck, into the screen (somewhat likely, but I would expect flickering when the screen is articulated and wiggled), or it's the LCD panel itself - most likely, I believe, and frankly also probably the easiest to replace. The second easiest would be the logic board, but the video cable is contained within the neck itself, and getting a new neck with wiring harness so far seems rather difficult. I would also like to avoid replacing the logic board because there is little certainty that I would get another 800MHz first-gen board, which is what I very specifically want.

Now, this machine does actually have video output. It's one of the few macs (along with a handful of iBooks, PowerBooks, and other iMac G4s and G5s) from the early 2000s to use "Mini VGA" which, aside from having a weird connector, is exactly what it sounds like. On this machine it doesn't allow for adding a second extended display - it can only mirror the primary display - but in this case that happens to be exactly what I want to do. Enough macs used Mini VGA that there are a plethora of the adapters available, and I was able to pick one up for about $4 shipped. So you may be able to see where I'm going here.

What I have chosen to do is remove the neck and screen assembly entirely, and what remains is what I have chosen to name "The Dome". The Dome is, obviously, the bottom half of an iMac G4 - a white plastic hemisphere driving an external monitor. It looks a bit strange, sure, like a mac mini about to pop, but it is a more compact G4 running OS9 than either the Quicksilver or Digital Audio, so that's a plus. And at 800MHz with 512MB RAM, it's no slouch either. Granted the GPU is fixed (GeForce2 with 32MB) but seeing as it's only ever driving 1024x768, that's not really an issue. No potential for a SATA card either, but I plan to at least get it upgraded with a 7.2k hard drive - the original superdrive will stay.

The process for removing the neck and screen is fairly trivial. Remove the bottom case, disconnect all the wires, and set it aside. Remove the drive carrier, power supply, and fan from the upper housing. The hardest part is removing the extraneous wires from the blind mate connector. This connector carriers a number of signals - power/sleep LED, microphone, display inverter voltages, fan, and speaker. Everything but the fan and speaker is in the display, so I removed those pins from the connector. The fan could be powered from the drives' molex connectors, and you could forgo a speaker, but I didn't want to do either. I also took this opportunity to clean out the fan and top of the case, as well as the peculiar two-part power supply. The neck is secured to the base with five screws, and once they are removed it pops straight off, and the various wires are fed through the hole left behind. I may 3D print something to cap this hole, but for the time being I am going to leave it as is.

As mentioned earlier, I do plan to upgrade the hard drive to a 7200RPM unit. The costs of PC133 SODIMMs are also so low right now that, at $8 shipped, there's really no good reason to not upgrade it to 1GB RAM. The fan is a standard 92mm PWM unit, so I plan to upgrade that to a Noctua as well. There's no real need for this - the included fan works just fine - but I would like something with greater airflow at lower speed. I would also like to find something that allows me to monitor the temperature and fan speed in OS9, though I don't know that such a utility exists. I have also noticed, in a couple of days of using it, that it is far more stable than my Digital Audio. This will require some further followup and investigation, and perhaps a future post.

Even though it's in packed away in the storage unit right now, I have been thinking a lot about the C220M3. Specifically about its own storage. Right now the only aspect of the machine that I have not seen to in one way or another is drives, specifically drive caddies - which, frankly, is not an uncommon issue with servers. Some machines, like the G5-7 HPs, and a few generations of Dells, share caddies (within their respective brands, granted). Because of this, their caddies are incredibly cheap. For this cisco, on the other hand, the caddies are relatively more expensive, often around $15 each. It's often more cost effective to just go ahead and buy caddies with drives in them already, provided you're okay with it being spinning media. The one drive I have for the machine now, the drive it came with, is an A03-D600GA2 - a Western Digital 600GB 10kRPM SAS hard drive. Aside from being a spinner, and having all of the downsides of spinners, there's nothing wrong with it.

Additional A03-D600GA2s, with caddy, are often about $50-60 shipped on ebay - which isn't bad, but I don't want them, for a few reasons typical of hard drives. I don't want to deal with the additional power consumption and the heat generation that goes with that. I also don't need the relatively cheaper dollar-per-gigabyte that spinners offer, since any large amount of data I need to to store can live on the NAS. Since SATA drives can be plugged into SAS backplanes, what I done prior to taking the C220M3 offline was have SSDs simply hanging out in the bays, two 480 and two 240 - the former in a RAID1, the latter in a RAID0. These were in bays 5, 6, 7, 8 whose SAS cable was connected to the Adaptec 2405 PCIe card I had added. This was necessary because ESXi has no support for the onboard intel soft raid - I had more posts about that in the past so I won't really go into it here.

Anywhoo, I was talking with some pals earlier tonight about storage and we started looking specifically for quad m.2 SATA PCIe cards. I know there are practical reasons for this not to be a thing, but they kind of are. Quad NVMe m.2 cards are actually fairly common. But that's not what this is about. This is about mSATA, which predated m.2 and was briefly popular. A card I found that I am particularly interested in is the Addonics AD4MSPX2-A - a $55 PCIe card with four mSATA slots and a Marvell RAID controller. It supports 1, 0, and 1+0 (which is what I would be using) and based on some cursory research on mSATA SSD prices, it seems rather competitive for what I am interested in - which is reliable SSDs that are "fast enough" - I don't need blazing.

256GB mSATA SSDs, name brand models from Samsung and the like, are about $50-60 on the second hand market. Four drives plus the card comes out at $260 or so, which is not bad at all for a bootable 512GB RAID1+0. Unfortunately 512GB mSATA SSDs are not very cost effective, still priced at around $100-115, putting a 1TB RAID1+0 closer to the price point of standard 2.5" SATA SSDs. Certainly one could take this in the other direction as well - 128GB mSATA drives can be found for as little as $20 shipped, meaning you could get a 512GB RAID0 (cough) for a mere $130 or so. Would I trust it? No, probably not, but I would sure as hell try it.

So why is this so interesting to me? Well, one of the PCIe slots in the C220M3 is already occupied by the the Adaptec 2405, so swapping that out with the Addonics card wouldn't cost me anything more. If I use the eight SAS bays on the front as individual drives in ESXi I can also pass them straight through to VMs, meaning I can use softraid in windows/linux, and at the very least have some dedicated IOPS for those VMs. Or I can just not use those bays at all, and only use the Addonics card. Now, I don't know yet if ESXi supports this Marvell chipset - I don't have high hopes, but I'm certain that windows and linux do, so there's always Hyper-V and Proxmox. (Hyper-V and Proxmox also support the Intel SoftRAID, so, you know... but... nevermind that).

Either way, look forward to a post with more information on this. I am incredibly interested in what a card like this can do, especially as mSATA prices continue to fall. More likely than not I would start with four 32 or 64GB for testing, then once I am satisfied with the performance, get another Addonics card and four 256GB drives. This gets me a 128/256GB fast scratch volume and a nice big protected working volume. It may be a while, but this will be interesting, I can promise that!

UPDATE 1 - Found a cheaper card here: Syba SI-PEX40109 - Currently $55 on prime. I also like the form factor a bit more than the Addonics model - it has an SFF adapter, and is a bit shorter because it has two mSATA on the front and two on the back. Not sure how the chipsets compare...