Where to buy genuine Intel X520 and X540 NIC?

[CookieMonster]

Hi,
Read a bunch of horror stories about fake Intel 10Gbe NICs being sold both on new and used markets.
(e.g., https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/intel-x520-10g-1-x8-does-not-work-at-10-gb-s.103743/ )

So, I was wondering what are good places to buy a genuine card without overpaying.

Thanks you

 

[jgreco]

Hardware Buying Guide - some tips for not getting ripped off

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. I’ve been giving this information out piecemeal for years, and should maybe have it summarized in one place. There’s been a lot of people...

www.truenas.com

Basically you need to do a little research. There are eBay resellers who sell retired gear in great volumes that come from data centers where old servers are being parts'ed up. Best source for hardware. They'll usually have thousands of feedback with a 99.9% and their other sales and sales history are ALL computer gear. It's the skeezy ones, often in LA or the Bay Area, who are unloading crap that just came out of a shipping container from China alongside cheap non-computer crap, you want to avoid.

 

[CookieMonster]

Hardware Buying Guide - some tips for not getting ripped off

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. I’ve been giving this information out piecemeal for years, and should maybe have it summarized in one place. There’s been a lot of people...

www.truenas.com

Basically you need to do a little research. There are eBay resellers who sell retired gear in great volumes that come from data centers where old servers are being parts'ed up. Best source for hardware. They'll usually have thousands of feedback with a 99.9% and their other sales and sales history are ALL computer gear. It's the skeezy ones, often in LA or the Bay Area, who are unloading crap that just came out of a shipping container from China alongside cheap non-computer crap, you want to avoid.

Thank you, jgreco!
Just to clarify for my OCD brain: Would you stay away from LA/Bay Area merchants based on their location alone, or only when combined with the other red flags below?
- also sell unrelated stuff
- <99% rating

I would imagine there are a lot of data centers in Bay Area and--therefore--legitimate decommissioned parts merchants in that region, right?

 

[jgreco]

Would you stay away from LA/Bay Area merchants based on their location alone

Yes, because there are other reasons. When I have trouble with stuff, I've had to contact vendors and I find that west coast sellers can be harder to communicate with. I kept getting brushed off by a Bay Area vendor on some relatively expensive (several hundred dollar) bit of gear that had been warranted for maybe 90 days? It went awry after the eBay window closed. My hearing is not great -- tinnitus is the result of a lifetime spent around loud gear, even with hearing protection -- and quite frankly I have a hard time understanding accents I'm not familiar with. I notice this in LA and the Bay Area when trying to talk to people on the phone; distributors like Ma Labs, Advanced Industrial Computer, and Supermicro seem to be a bit difficult. This usually isn't a problem given some time and patience, but I've run across several west coast eBay sellers who seem to make the return process near impossible. I had one who wouldn't return e-mails, was virtually impossible to talk to on the phone, etc. I ended up showing up at their offices with my bit of $badstuff and asking for a return in person. I have occasionally had return experiences at Garland, Monarch, etc., which were relatively painless and easy by comparison. Between the greater risks of fakes and the annoyance level, ...

I would imagine there are a lot of data centers in Bay Area and--therefore--legitimate decommissioned parts merchants in that region, right?

Sort of. I have a suspicion a lot of recycling in the Bay Area happens via shipping elsewhere, however. I can't prove that. But if you're interested in where the goodies are, I suggest reading the following article, especially this bit:

Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in the United States and comprises several counties located 20 to 40 miles west of Washington, D.C. Specifically, Northern Virginia includes Loudoun County (Ashburn, Sterling, Leesburg, Arcola), Prince William County (Manassas, Gainesville, Haymarket), and Fairfax County (Reston, Herndon, Chantilly, Vienna, McLean, Tysons), among others. Those data centers are powered by Dominion Energy, the largest electric utility serving Northern Virginia, and NOVEC (Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative) is another important provider of power. Cloud computing services operating in the area include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Meta Platforms (Facebook).

Northern Virginia is followed by Dallas and its neighboring suburbs, including Allen, Carrollton, Fort Worth, Frisco, Garland, Irving, Lewisville, Plano, and Richardson. In total, the area is home to more than 150 data centers and more than 650 megawatts of multi-tenant commissioned power. Among its wholesale data centers are Digital Realty, CyrusOne, QTS Data Centers, STACK Infrastructure. Retail colocation players such as Equinix, DataBank, Flexential and Cyxtera can be found there.

Silicon Valley, the country’s third-largest data center market, has more than 160 data centers with more than 625 megawatts of power supplied primarily by Pacific Gas & Electric and Silicon Valley Power. Operating from those facilities is a veritable who’s who of retail colocation and wholesale data center players, as well as cloud computer giants, including Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud.

The greater Phoenix area with its surrounding communities of Chandler, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale and Goodyear, represent the fourth-ranked data center market, with more than 90 facilities and more than 600 megawatt of multi-tenant commissioned power. Digital Realty is a player there, as are Cyxtera, Flexential, CyrusOne, Iron Mountain, Aligned Data Centers and Compass Datacenters.

Personally I find the most useful and pleasant recyclers seem to be in Texas. Garland Computers is located there as are a number of others.

 

[CookieMonster]

Yes, because there are other reasons. When I have trouble with stuff, I've had to contact vendors and I find that west coast sellers can be harder to communicate with. I kept getting brushed off by a Bay Area vendor on some relatively expensive (several hundred dollar) bit of gear that had been warranted for maybe 90 days? It went awry after the eBay window closed. My hearing is not great -- tinnitus is the result of a lifetime spent around loud gear, even with hearing protection -- and quite frankly I have a hard time understanding accents I'm not familiar with. I notice this in LA and the Bay Area when trying to talk to people on the phone; distributors like Ma Labs, Advanced Industrial Computer, and Supermicro seem to be a bit difficult. This usually isn't a problem given some time and patience, but I've run across several west coast eBay sellers who seem to make the return process near impossible. I had one who wouldn't return e-mails, was virtually impossible to talk to on the phone, etc. I ended up showing up at their offices with my bit of $badstuff and asking for a return in person. I have occasionally had return experiences at Garland, Monarch, etc., which were relatively painless and easy by comparison. Between the greater risks of fakes and the annoyance level, ...



Sort of. I have a suspicion a lot of recycling in the Bay Area happens via shipping elsewhere, however. I can't prove that. But if you're interested in where the goodies are, I suggest reading the following article, especially this bit:



Personally I find the most useful and pleasant recyclers seem to be in Texas. Garland Computers is located there as are a number of others.

This guy?

Security Measure

www.ebay.com

Thank you for the explanation. I appreciate your experience. Also, cool analysis about where data centers are concentrated the most! Helpful to know.

By the way, would you happen to know which good HBA cards (brand, model) draw the least electricity? Do 16 port ones always consume more watts compared to, say, 4-8 port ones? Thank you

 

[jgreco]

By the way, would you happen to know which good HBA cards (brand, model) draw the least electricity? Do 16 port ones always consume more watts compared to, say, 4-8 port ones? Thank you

The LSI HBA's are essentially a little PowerPC system-on-chip but I haven't seen good head-to-head comparisons of actual watt burn. I obtained my own numbers for watt-burn for various cards by putting a bunch of cards into a server with 6x PCIe slots and then carefully measuring load at the plug under various conditions using a bench-grade Valhalla power analyzer, then dividing the differential by six. This isn't true power draw because it includes overhead introduced by the PSU, etc., but it answers the question most people ask, how much more will my HBA draw than a system without. I'd love to get one of the little gizmos that allows measurements at the PCIe slot but I'd use it so infrequently...

Anyways the problem here is that I have really only tested the LSI 9211/9240 HBA's and I don't have numbers for the larger ones. Check out the clock speed of the larger ones to see if you can get an idea.

If you are really worried about power usage, I will note that you can find SATA AHCI PCie controllers such as the AsMedia 106x series controllers, as long as they are legit (not knockoff) silicon and do not have port multipliers. These are supported on both SCALE and CORE. Marvell 88SE9230 and 88SE9172 are also expected to be compatible. These are most often found as PCIe 2.0 x1 cards so be aware of the bandwidth limits. The 9230 can be found as PCIe x2. Remember that ZFS will pound a crapton (that's a technical term) of I/O simultaneously at a pool during scrubs/resilvers, so performance on an x1 card is best oriented towards hard drives. These things take almost no power and I guarantee two 9230's will be much lower power than a single LSI 9211-8i. I can't speak to things such as whether hotswap is properly supported by any of the SATA AHCI controllers, so maybe don't try to hotswap drives if you're using them.

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. In the last year or two, we’ve had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use...

www.truenas.com

 

[NickF]

I’m a big fan of
Theartofserver

And

Unixsurplus

On ebay

 

[jgreco]

I've exchanged (rather trite) messages with TheArtOfServer but also forum users have had very good support results when they have problems.

UNIX Surplus is usually a little bit overpriced, but also nothing bad to say. It just goes to show that eBay isn't a total s***hole. Shop carefully, shop smart.