On a Raspberry Pi, I'm testing out the KIOXIA CM6 and PM6 Enterprise SSDs.

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2021-05-14 15:00:43

Late last year, an engineer at Broadcom sent me some hardware and offered some help getting Broadcom's MegaRAID card working on the Raspberry Pi. It took some time, but eventually we were able to get the card and a demonstrator 'UBM' backplane working on the Pi, and it culminated in my posting about Hardware RAID on the Pi, and on a livestream, getting 16 hard drives working on a Pi.

The one thing I couldn't test in those earlier videos was the backplane and storage card's 'Tri-mode' support, allowing PCI Express NVMe drives—like KIOXIA's CM6—to work in the same slot as the SATA and SAS drives I was used to testing.

I tested both drives inside the experimental 'Elrond' backplane, which is a demonstrator for Universal Backplane Management (SFF-TA-1005), connected through the Broadcom MegaRAID 9460-16i card, and as promised, I was able to hot-swap SATA, SAS, and NVMe drives using the same slots.

Before getting to the benchmarks, I figured I should explain a little more about the 'U.3' (SFF-TA-1001) NVMe drive I tested, the CM6.