NVMe M.2 Destroyinator

[JNTK984]

Greetings to all.

 

I work in a warehouse that gets multiple varieties of Amazon Returns to process for potential refurbishment. One category that is slightly a PITA are the NVMe/M.2 SSDs. Our current process of wiping those style of drives is tedious to the power of OK, boomer!

 

Basically, we have several laptops and adapters that plug in. I won't link them here as I don't really know the brands of the USB adapters. There are also two open air workstations that have slots for certain M.2 SSDs, and the process on that is typically power off machine then install the returned drive, boot machine, and run the erasure tool we have to use. Then once complete, each individual drive has to be removed and placed in the original box or a new one it the OEM one is toast. Some weeks we have at least 75 of what I call wafer style drives come in. The average time to wipe one drive is around 40 minutes to an hour, depending on the size and layout of the drive.

 

What I'm looking for is advice on how to put together a relatively cheap yet robust system that can handle maybe 8 drives at once, or more if there are enough lanes to accommodate that. I did find a Silverstone 3.5" adapter tray that takes 4 SATA ports and converts them to M.2, sadly, it doesn't support NVMe. There was another Silverstone 3.5" bay adapter that had space for 1 NVMe drive and 2 M.2 SATA drives, which seems like it wouldn't be as effective.

 

Possible Q&A

Yes, we have a Blaanco rack. It doesn't have a way to use M.2 slots for running more than 2 at a time.

No, I can't answer what company I work for.

Yes, AMD or Intel can work for the main board, no preference.

Windows 10 is likely to be the preferred O/S for a system like what I'm asking advice for.

No, there is no way to secret ship the 2TB drives to anyone 'under the table'. (This one I do not expect anyone to ask in a follow up post, just being goofy )

 

Thank you for your time, and please if you are going to respond, ask not how Linus would answer, ask how you would!

[emosun]

i'd try to find a way to get the drives onto a plug an play port like usb so you don't have to shutdown the machine

 

you could just load a machine down with a bunch of usb nvme chips and that might work

[unijab]

I would go with something like....

 

 

Get a couple 9400-16i hbas.

Get the u.2 cables that connect to the hba

Then get the u.2 to m.2 adapters.

 

Depending on your os and motherboard... Hot plug should work.

 

even If not it should support 8-16 m.2 nvme drives

[GDRRiley]

there are m.2 quad PCIE cards that may work well.