The Bleeding Edge

The replacement for the OWC 32TB PCIe array arrived, and I sent the first one back to Illinois. I powered down the workstation, removed the external drives, popped the cover (so easy on the model), and installed the new array. I put the skin back on, connected the external … [Read more...]

While Dell was building the 7865, I ordered a PCIe SSD array from OWC, populated with 8 4 TB M.2 drives for a total of 32 TB. Today I installed it in the workstation. I updated SoftRAID before I started. If you've been following along, you'll remember that it refused to start … [Read more...]

I ordered 4 8TB M.2 SSDs from Amazon. I ordered a Thunderbolt 3 4 drive housing called the 4M2 from OWC. The SSDs came with heat sinks.  The housing came with a fan. There's no room for the fan when the heat sinks are present. Here's a look at the housing with two of the 8TB … [Read more...]

To my surprise and pleasure, the Dell workstation came with a  10 GbE motherboard port. I've been using 10 GbE for about 5 years now in the server room, using mostly fiber connections, but, in recent years, some copper ones. I've bought workstations with it, but never used that … [Read more...]

In the preceding post, I observed a gradual, intermittent failure of an OWC disk array. I suspected the OWC box, but it could have been one of the 18TB Toshiba disks, so I popped them out of the box and installed them in an OWC dock. I copied over 8 TB of data to each … [Read more...]