Netgate 6100 replacement 128GB NVMe drive

davebonnell

I purchased a 6100 max with a 128GB NVMe drive which failed shortly after the 1 year warranty.

Support indicated that Netgate does not sell drives for the 6100 but did offer that https://www.innodisk.com/en/products/flash-storage/m2-pcie/m2-p80-3te4-b-m-key was installed.

Other notes from support included that you'll want to make sure you do not purchase a drivelisted in this bug report since these are known to cause boot problems: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/15110

And the compatible drive should be 2280 size NVME and have a b+m key.

So...

With the warranty now void I was able to unscrew the various attachment points and pop open the case. This was straightforward with little risk of plastic damage.

The drive itself is above the motherboard with an air gap below. There is plenty of space.

A replacement innodisk drive was over $100 for 128GB and appeared in short supply. I wanted to use a different manufacturer anyway since it failed so quickly. I found a 2230 sized card and bought a 2230 to 2280 adapter to make sure it fit.

I purchased the following:

Western Digital WD 128GB SSD PC SN520 M.2 2230 30mm PCIe Gen3 x2 NVMe SDAPTUW-128G Solid State Drive for Dell HP Lenovo Laptop Desktop Ultrabook Kiosk POS MFP IoT

JMT NGFF NVME M2 M2PLUS 2230 to 2280 Adapter Card 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280 Extended Transfer Long Size Change for M.2 U.2 M3 M.3 SSD (1Piece)

I was able to install pfSense on the drive without issue.

# smartctl -a /dev/nvme0
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       PC SN520 NVMe WDC 128GB
Serial Number:                      1943AB806570
Firmware Version:                   20240012
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x15b7
IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x001b44
Total NVM Capacity:                 128,035,676,160 [128 GB]

Hopefully this helps someone else navigate a drive failure on a 6100.

dennypage

@davebonnell said in Netgate 6100 replacement 128GB NVMe drive:

And the compatible drive should be 2280 size NVME and have a b+m key.

I believe the "2280 size" was intended to mean that it cannot be larger than a 2280. It doesn't actually need to be 80mm long.

I don't believe there is a mount for a 2230, but there is definitely one for a 2242 which is a common size and avoids the need for an adapter. If memory serves, there are mounts for 42, 60 and 80. YMMV.