Installing the system on a Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB

[DKnoto]

Heya everyone,

At the outset, I would like to mention that I waited almost four and a half years for my own Talos II station. This whole story deserves a separate article
and I even started to prepare for it. But I figured I needed a working base first to be able to write anything on my new toy without going back to x86 too
much.

For my first attempt, I decided to install FreeBSD 13.1 on two Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. I put the disks into the Highpoint SSD7502 controller. As expected,
I saw two separate drives as a possible installation location. Unfortunately I couldn't use ZFS to do RAID although it was stated on the FreeBSD website
that ZFS runs on the powerpc64 platform. I marked the first disk as the target and decided to partition it. Partitioning worked, I chose UFS as the root
filesystem and FAT as the system for the kernel partition. I started the installation. This operation did not produce the expected results, a process crashed
while trying to unpack base.tar.xz.

So I thought that the problem may be the raid controller, because FreeBSD does not have a dedicated driver for it. So I replaced the controller with a simple
ICY BOX M.2 NVME to PCIe 4.0 adapter: IB-PCI208-HS. Unfortunately, this operation did not help. I still couldn't install the system. So I decided to try the
powerpc64le version. Surprisingly, this version installed and I was even able to boot the system. However, my joy lasted only a short time, when I tried to install
packages, the system crashed.

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Second try:

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I found information on the network that there were performance problems with the first Samsung 980 Pro disks for PCIe 4.0. I decided to replace
the firmware. I moved the adapter to Dell OptiPlex 7040 and updated the firmware:

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After this operation, I decided to reduce the system installation time and focus on disk tests. I have successfully installed FreeBSD on a USB key.
With the key, the system worked flawlessly. Unfortunately, attempts to access the SSD drive always end up in the disappearance of the device.
Fortunately, the system did not lock up anymore.

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I was disappointed. I tell myself I'll try Linux. It's probably much better here. I have installed the distribution that I use professionally on x86, AlmaLinux 9:

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Installation seemed to go smoothly, but there were momentary system freezes. I looked at the logs and my worst expectations came true:

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After five such errors, the system stops operating the device and further normal operation becomes impossible. Usually, full freezing of work occurs
within a quarter of an hour.

Of course, I have no more ideas what to do with it. Any help is appreciated...

PS. Sorry for the lack of direct images, but I'm having trouble providing the correct DropBox preview links.

[pocock]

I have the following setup

2x PM9A1 (the OEM version of the 980 Pro)

2× IB-PCI208-HS - Icy Box PCIe 4.0

Linux with btrfs RAID1

I use the Debian stable kernel rebuilt for the 4k page size as described in other discussions in this forum
5.10.0-8-powerpc64le-4k


I purchased the SSDs in October 2021

The system has currently been running 177 days without reboot

[DKnoto]

My disks are:



I tested the first disk from 2022.01, I will now check the second from 2022.03.

[DKnoto]

Pocock thanks a lot for suggesting it should work. Cause of problems identified.

I conducted three experiments:

a) new ssd without thermal pad and heatsink -> works fine with AlmaLinux and FreeBSD;
b) new ssd with thermal pad and heatsink -> does not work;
c) old ssd without thermal pad and heatsink -> works fine with AlmaLinux and FreeBSD.

The problem is the thermal pad. I have one with a thickness of 2 mm. It is possible that something is short-circuiting or pressing down.