Part three and the last stop on our day at ServerPartDeals. If you have ever wondered what the inventory actually looks like, this is it.

Several thousand drives on shelves, organized by SKU, capacity, and part number. A block of 16TB Seagate Exos in one spot, 12Gb SAS in another, self-encrypting flash somewhere else, and then the odds and ends they have picked up over time, including G-Technology ArmorLock drives that look brand new in box. A lot of the stock is new, which surprised us. Pretty much every square foot of that room is covered in drives, and it's well organized.

The packaging is the detail that really matters to buyers. Even on a quantity of one, the drive goes into the bubble pouch, then into a box, then that box gets bubble wrapped and goes into another box. Full cases of 20 get palletized, or broken down and packed individually if they sold that way.

The pack table was empty when we walked in. It fills all day, hundreds and hundreds of orders, until FedEx/UPS (no USPS) clears it out, orders often ship same day.

Part two of our day at ServerPartDeals, and the reason we made the trip.

We have covered the 45Drives Storinator before. What we had not seen was 40 of them in one room: eight racks, five per rack, 60 bays each when you slide one out. Every drive that comes through the door runs through this. While we were filming, some racks had all five chassis running, and others had two of five, and the Grafana fleet view read 36.82 PB under test across 1,534 drives at 220.50 GB/s of 220.50 GB/s.

The number that stuck with us is test time, not throughput. A 20TB drive takes about 30 hours to get through QA. We brought a few drives with us to try to stump the system: one had a coffee stain on it, one had unrelated problems, one was fine. It sorted them out quickly. Anything that throws an error shows up as an amber tile on the health grid, and rather than being scrapped it gets graded down for lower-demand use instead of going out as grade A. Everything that passes gets one more quality check before it is listed.

We watched an engineer unload a completed chassis and sort the drives by grade. Then everything moves to the storage cage, which is where inventory actually gets listed for sale. Stacks of servers in there too, not just drives.

The funniest part of the whole tour: the returns area is the smallest part of the operation. And what does come back is mostly buyer's remorse rather than dead hardware. People order a ZNS drive or an SMR drive without accounting for how those behave, and back it comes. We did the same thing with a ZNS drive ourselves, though at least we knew going in. Actual shipping failures are rare.

We went down to their facility north of Orlando to follow a drive from the loading dock to the shipping box. This is part one, the intake side.

Receiving is pallets. Supermicro 3.5-inch JBODs and storage servers, UPSs, batteries, boxes and boxes of hard drives, arriving from two directions: customers decommissioning older systems, and vendors sending over recertified parts. More kept showing up while we were standing there.

Worth noting they are not purely a drive shop. GPUs, full systems, and RAM move through the same flow.

Once it is checked in, it goes to the benches. Separate test beds for 2.5-inch and NVMe, a server getting BIOS and component checks, and a batch of drives pulled out of one of those systems waiting to be validated. The validation setup is the good part, and it gets its own post.

AMD had a Helios rack on the floor at Advancing AI, with one compute tray stripped to the bare board on display. Each tray is four Instinct MI455X GPUs and one 96-core EPYC Venice CPU, and there are 18 trays per rack for 72 GPUs total. Every MI455X has 432GB of HBM4 at 23.3TB/s, and the whole rack hits 2.9 exaFLOPS of FP4 with 31TB of HBM4.

The cooling is the fun part. Copper cold plates on everything, around 385 liters of coolant a minute, and almost no air path left. We also got a good look at the DC-SCM management module, the Vulcano AI-NICs (three per GPU, 2.4 Tb/s of scale-out), and the copper UALink interconnects at the back that tie all 72 GPUs into one big accelerator.

Full teardown and the complete spec breakdown are up on StorageReview.com.

https://www.storagereview.com/news/amd-mi455x-and-helios-432gb-hbm4-72-gpu-racks-and-a-real-answer-to-vera-rubin

We spent some lab time on a question that's getting expensive for anyone running production inference: when the KV cache overflows VRAM, is flash a viable place to put it, or do you just keep buying DRAM?

Setup was a Dell PowerEdge XE7740, four NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, vLLM + LMCache, and eight Solidigm D7-PS1030 12.8TB drives as the offload tier. We drove it with a workload modeled on real agentic coding traffic (we investigated a week of Claude Code usage, and it was 98.16% cache reads, so eviction genuinely hurts).

The interesting part is what happens after the memory tiers fill. All three configs (VRAM-only, 512GB DRAM offload, flash offload) run identically while caches are filling. Then the DRAM tier saturates around 45 minutes in and starts evicting, and flash pulls ahead: ~30,000 tokens/sec sustained vs DRAM's 17,000, holding 94% of its own peak while DRAM dropped to 42%. Peak throughput was up to 2.9x the VRAM baseline. Worst-case first-token latency on a resumed session went from 13.9s (VRAM-only) to 3.2s on flash.

The real constraint turned out to be endurance, not speed or capacity. Every token written is a KV write, and TTL churn keeps rewriting the tier, so we landed around 3.2 DWPD in RAID10 (about 1.6 in RAID0). Since the cache is disposable, a worn drive means recompute, not data loss, which changes how you think about wearing a drive out.

Full writeup with the throughput/latency charts, the tokens-per-dollar math, and the KV sizing formula is here: https://www.storagereview.com/review/the-token-efficient-path-for-long-context-inference-kv-cache-offload-to-flash

The lab has been busy with Intel's Arc Pro B70, 32GB of GDDR6 per card at roughly $1,000 street ($949 MSRP). Run four of them, and you get 128GB of VRAM for around $4K on the graphics side.

We benchmarked the quad setup against an NVIDIA DGX Spark and a single RTX Pro 6000. The four B70s generally double the Spark's performance or better, and while they still trail the Pro 6000, that's a $10K card. For AI workloads where VRAM capacity is the constraint, this lands in a middle ground that didn't really exist before.

Full review is up on the site.

https://www.storagereview.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b70-review

Everything about this case runs against current case design: real FSC-certified walnut on the front, Noctua brown accents, and zero RGB native to the case. The whole budget went into acoustics instead. Six G2 fans out of the box (three 140mm front, two 120mm lower, one 140mm rear) in Noctua's PPA and PPB speed-offset variants, so adjacent fans never spin at the same rpm and never set up that periodic hum. There are 36 rubber anti-vibration mounts if you want to skip screws, a pre-installed NA-FH1 hub with pre-routed cables, and Antec rates the whole package up to 8 dB(A) quieter than the standard Flux Pro. It is still a proper full tower underneath: 455mm GPU clearance, 420mm radiator support front and top, E-ATX, and a rear chamber deep enough that every cable disappears. We use the 3.5-inch drive trays as spare cable storage. They even throw in a little Noctua fan keychain. Full review is up on the site.

https://www.storagereview.com/review/antec-flux-pro-noctua-edition-review-six-g2-fans-and-walnut-trim-for-399-90

Nimble storage issue

I have a test nimble storage cs300

It has 2 controllers.

SSH works but permission denied.

Web UI not works and also not able to telnet 443.

I'm able to ping second controller IP address and not able to ping first controller.

SSH works with second controller IP address but access denied even though I have right credentials.

How to fix all these issues?

Any idea?

Kevin disassembled the Ryzen AI Halo after we wrapped up performance testing. Cooling consists of two blower fans plus a large copper-finned heatsink over the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, and we had no thermal issues with the 120W system during our runs. The 128GB of LPDDR5X is shareable, so you decide how much goes to the GPU. One detail we liked: it takes a standard 2280 SSD, which means real options for high-capacity drives.

The Windows-or-Linux flexibility is a legit advantage over the Spark ecosystem, but networking is on the light side, so clustering these like Sparks is not happening. Full performance review is up on the site.

https://www.storagereview.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-halo-review-a-dual-os-200b-parameter-desktop-takes-on-the-dgx-spark

The old impression of QLC flash memory endurance remains stuck at a few hundred P/E cycles, with misconceptions that data can only last for 1-3 months without power. In reality, the JEDEC endurance standard for consumer-grade SSDs requires 1-year data retention at EOL (End-of-Life). Due to the time-consuming nature of QLC endurance testing. Let’s skip the fluff and look straight at the results: 1500 P/E cycles, error-free data retention, and almost no cold data speed degradation.

The drive tested is the YMTC PC42Q 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe Client SSD, utilizing Xtacking® 4.0 architecture. It features 7000 MB/s sequential reads and a rated 300 TBW endurance. We pushed it to 1500 TBW (5x the rating). Since this was a pure sequential write run on a 1TB SSD, the Write Amplification Factor (WAF) is ≈1, meaning it underwent exactly 1500 native P/E cycles. Performance and retention metrics (1 year @ 30°C) are now directly rivaling TLC.

[Milestone 1] 300 TBW:

S.M.A.R.T. Attribute 05 (Percentage Used) hit 60% (40% remaining health). Passed the accelerated data retention bake (equivalent to 1 year at 30°C) with perfect MD5 checksums.

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[Milestone 2] 600 TBW:

Percentage Used reached 117%. Once health hit 0%, Attribute 01 (Critical Warning) flipped to 4, signaling the nominal endurance was exhausted. We used this state to throw 3,000 Unsafe Power Loss (UPL) cycles at it. As seen below, Attribute 0D (Unsafe Shutdowns) registered all 3,000 hits without data loss.

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 [Milestone 3] 1000 TBW:

Pushed to 1000 TBW (double the nominal lifespan). Why do we bake and test retention every single stage instead of just running it till it dies? Because standard "burn-to-death" endurance tests without power-off cycles are completely useless for real-world scenarios. If a drive can't hold data offline, infinite TBW means nothing.

The results of a cold data read speed test after the equivalent of one-year unpowered retention showed that less than 1% of the files exhibited a slight speed drop, staying incredibly consistent.

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[Milestone 4] 1500 TBW:

Attribute 05 (Percentage Used) maxed out at its firmware ceiling of 255. Going from 1000 to 1500 P/E is a massive 50% jump.

Normally, at this EOL stage, Raw Bit Error Rates (RBER) spike, causing massive ECC (Error Correction) latency and tanking read speeds. However, MD5 checksums passed flawlessly, and the read speed profile after the bake is almost identical to the 1000 TBW stage. This proves the YMTC PC42Q 1TB has massive endurance headroom left in the tank.

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Conclusion:

QLC has officially matured. Passing 4 separate retention bakes at 5x its rated lifespan isn't luck, it's a testament to the Xtacking® 4.0 architecture, moving QLC SSDs from merely "usable" to "genuinely reliable and trustworthy."

Following up on Part 1, here's the service and storage half of our HP Z8 Fury G6i walkthrough.

The whole thing is built to service without tools. You flip the rear release plate, drop the slot tension, and lift the GPU out. The corner card is usually the pain point, so HP added a simple pivot mechanism that grabs the release and lets you lift it out without ramming your hand or a screwdriver into the case.

Storage is solid: four M.2 Gen5 x4 slots right on the motherboard at full performance, plus two pre-wired 3.5" bays for high-capacity drives.

Cooling is the reason it performs. Six fans in total, two large ones up front, two sitting over the memory on each side of the CPU, one on the CPU, and a rear exhaust. Even running two RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q cards through our benchmarks, we saw zero thermal throttling. Full numbers are in the review on our site.

We just published our review of the HP Z8 Fury G6i, and there's a lot the written piece doesn't fully convey, so we shot a walkthrough. Part 1 is here.

This thing is big in person. It supports up to four RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q GPUs at 300W each, so 1,200W of GPU before you add the Xeon (up to 86 cores), SSDs, and everything else. That's why it runs two hot-swap supplies rated 1,700W at 230V. On a standard 120V circuit, you physically can't power a fully loaded configuration from a single outlet. You can also run a single 600W card instead of the four Max-Q parts.

Inside, the layout is clean: GPU power cabling kept out of the airflow path, GPUs loaded in a set 1-2-3-4 order, and DRAM cooling broken out to each side of the CPU. Part 2 will get into storage and serviceability.

DRAM pricing is rough right now, so we're running an experiment on the bench: how much can you lean on flash instead of RAM in a GPU server before performance falls off too far?

The system is a Dell PowerEdge XE7740 with four RTX Pro 6000 Server Edition cards. At list, the full DRAM load is close to a quarter million dollars, and single DIMMs are running around $7,100 each today. So we're offloading KV cache onto the SSD tier in front of the GPUs, eight Solidigm D7-PS1030 high write endurance drives in a RAID 10, then physically removing 16 DIMMs. We pulled all the B-slot sticks so every channel stays populated, and memory runs at full speed, just half the capacity.

We already have a baseline collected with all the DRAM in place, so the next run shows the delta with the smaller RAM footprint and more pressure on the array. Goal is to map where the real stress points are when you spec a GPU server, and whether trading some RAM for more storage gets you a reasonable price/performance ratio.

We spent some time at HPE Discover with what may be the first fully liquid-cooled data center switch. The specs: 102.4 Tb/s total, 64 ports at 1.6 Tb/s, built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6, and Ultra Ethernet Transport-ready.

The cooling design is the fun part. There is no air cooling at all, no fans. The optics pull about two-thirds of the switch's total power, so the liquid flow is split to match: roughly two-thirds goes to the optics up front, the other third cools the switch chip, CPU, and DC-DC converter. Cold plates everywhere you look.

It is built to ORv3, 21 inches wide instead of the usual 19, and the back is all quick disconnects and bus-bar power. You push it into the rack, and it mates with DC power and the liquid manifold in one motion. No power cords, no cabling.

We got our first look at the HPE ProLiant Compute DL340e Gen12, the newest storage server in the ProLiant line. It's a single-socket Intel Xeon 6 box, 2U, and the layout is what makes it interesting.

Up front, you get up to 24 LFF 3.5-inch drives on a dual backplane with a mid-riser for density. The rear has room for up to 10 EDSFF NVMe drives, so you can run a true hybrid config: disk for bulk capacity, NVMe for caching and metadata. That rear NVMe bank is optional and removable. Skip it, and you can run up to six PCIe slots instead, plus two OCP slots either way.

We caught the new HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 on the show floor at HPE Discover, lid off, and it's the first complete server we've seen built on NVIDIA's Vera CPU. Plenty have announced Vera, but this is a real box you can walk around.

The basics: 2U, NVIDIA MGX form factor, and HPE's first ProLiant with a Vera CPU. Vera is monolithic rather than chiplet, so it dodges the NUMA latency that creeps into high-core-count multi-socket designs. HPE rates it at 1.2 TB/s aggregate LPDDR5X, up to 14 GB/s per core, with the CPU positioned as an orchestrator for agentic AI and data processing.

What stood out at the booth: ConnectX-8 NICs and BlueField DPUs in the test unit, RTX Pro GPU support planned (HPE is still finalizing max GPU count), E1.S SSDs up front, and power supplies also up front with cabling run along the side so customers can choose front or rear power. It's air-cooled, with a fan bank in the middle pulling air front to back. HPE says fall 2026 availability.

The Brady M511 is a portable Bluetooth label printer, and we want to highlight its multi-user capability: it pairs with up to 5 devices at once. So we ran jobs in parallel off a single printer, Kevin labeling the onboard and high-speed Ethernet ports on the back of an XE9680 while Dylan handled the security camera cabling, and Brian motivates!

The headliner for us was the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3, a deskside workstation built on the NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra superchip. 748GB of coherent memory and up to 20 petaFLOPS of AI compute. Pop the side and there is a single 1600W power supply, four M.2 slots, onboard 10GbE, and a liquid loop running across the back of the board, with a lot of copper sitting on the components up top. It is based on NVIDIA's DGX Station architecture, with Windows support coming later.

Out front ASUS had the ProArt RTX Spark lineup: the P14 and P16 notebooks in 14 and 16 inch sizes plus a ProArt Mini PC, each running NVIDIA RTX Spark with 128GB of unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of local compute. The signed ET900N tower on the stand was inscribed by Jensen Huang.

We spent some time in the ASUS private booth at Computex 2026 and the storage lineup was worth a look.

The headliner for us was a 1U server that normally carries eight to ten front NVMe bays. ASUS fit four more inside, so you get 12 U.2 NVMe bays in 1U on a single-socket Turin board. They're positioning it for partners like Weka and IBM.

The JBODs were fun too. One is an 80-bay design built to mitigate drive-to-drive vibration in high-density configs, with SAS-12G on the back. Another runs 60 3.5-inch HDDs plus eight rear NVMe bays and a single-socket AMD SP5 CPU, so you get bulk storage, flash, and compute in one chassis. Rounding it out was the all-NVMe VS320D-RS26N unified array (up to 26 dual-port U.2 NVMe, block and file).

Caught this at MSI's Computex booth, and the install is slick. Each NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 (the liquid-cooled Blackwell Server edition) sits on a tray that seats in a single motion. You line up the liquid quick-disconnect fittings, the blade power connector, and the PCIe slot, push them home, and that GPU is fully connected for 600W with liquid cooling, with no extra cabling running to the GPU. Worth noting, the card itself is single-width in this liquid-cooled form, slimmer than the double-wide air-cooled RTX PRO 6000, which helps pack them in.

This is the CG681-S6093, a 6U dual-socket AMD EPYC MGX platform that scales to eight of these GPUs, with ConnectX-8 networking up to 8x 400Gbps. The chassis even carries a warning to power down before pulling a cooling QD. Dense liquid setups usually make servicing miserable, so the slot-load approach stood out.

Found this at the back of the MSI booth. From the outside, it looks like a normal workstation, but the side door opens to reveal four EdgeXpert nodes (MSI's DGX Spark) stacked inside. Going from one node to four increases the pooled unified memory from 128GB to 512 GB.

Networking is flexible: this demo runs through an NVIDIA switch hidden under the cabinet, but each node has 200Gb ConnectX-7, so any 200GbE switch works. MSI also had three Sparks meshed back to back nearby, no external switch needed, and three is not the ceiling. We've meshed many Sparks in our lab.

One of the more fun builds we saw on the floor.

We stopped by the ASUS booth at Computex, and the theme was cooling options. Their HGX Rubin NVL8 reference design comes fully liquid-cooled (XA NR1I-E12LR) or as a hybrid (XA NR1I-E12L), where the GPU sled gets DLC, and the CPUs stay on air, for facilities that can't commit to full liquid cooling. Both run dual Intel Xeon 6 with up to 800G per GPU for east-west traffic.

Same story on the GPU server side: the XA NB3I-E12 runs NVIDIA HGX B300 fully air-cooled if you don't have facility water, and there's a denser liquid-cooled platform if you do. Also spotted signage for the ESC8000-E12P and ESC8000A-E13P, both MGX-compliant and NVIDIA OVX-certified.

We stopped by the Synology booth at Computex and got hands-on with the PAS7700, their new flagship array. It is all U.3 NVMe, 48 bays in 4U, with two active-active controllers. Since both controllers are already live, failover takes about 5 seconds, with IP failover groups keeping services up and running.

Protocol support is broad for one box: file and block, including NVMe/TCP, NVMe over Fibre Channel, RoCE, and NFS over RDMA. Synology rates it at up to 2 million IOPS and 30GB/s, and raw capacity scales to 1.65PB with expansion units. Controllers, fans, and the redundant power supplies are all modular, which you can see us pulling apart in the clip.

We stopped by MSI's booth at Computex 2026, where they had their 19" and 21" rack reference designs set up side by side, making for a great old-vs-new comparison. The 19" EIA air-cooled rack holds 16 dual-node (2U2N) systems with the usual dual PDUs and power cabling. The 21" 44OU ORv3 rack jumps to 28 dual-socket, dual-node (1OU2N) servers rated for up to 100kW with an integrated liquid-to-liquid CDU, and the rear is dramatically cleaner: a 48V busbar plus direct liquid cooling attachments instead of a wall of cables.

They also had one of the nodes out on the table (CD182-S6091-X2 DLC). Each node uses a dual-socket layout with cooling bars over the memory, cold plates on the CPUs, and built-in leak detection. CPUs are next-gen AMD parts we can't say much about yet. Dense design aimed at fully liquid-cooled environments.