In my new, much smaller office, I needed a new, somewhat smaller workstation. I had been using a Lenovo P16 laptop with 128 GB of RAM, and, while it served me well for most things, it couldn’t handle the larger photographic and Matlab tasks very well. For the last decade or more, I’ve been buying Dell Precision workstations with dual Xeon processors, but those are quite large. I looked at a Dell Precision 7865, which uses a single AMD Threadripper processor. I ordered the machine with the 64-core Threadripper, 512 GB of RAM, and a Nvidia A6000 GPU. I also ordered a Eizo CG2700X monitor, which is smaller than the 32-inch Eizo and NEC monitors I have been using.
When the computer came, I installed it on a rolling file cabinet so I could get at all the sides without crawling around on the floor, which is now beyond me.
On the back of the computer was a PCIe header with two USB-C connectors and one DisplayPort connector. I was a little surprised that Nvidia had gone to USB-C, but I plugged the monitor into the DisplayPort.
I hit the power button, and waited.
No video.
I tried everything I could think of, including USB-C connections to the monitor.
No joy.
I called Dell support. The nice tech told me that the A6000 had 3 DisplayPort connectors and one HDMI. That caused me to get down low and look at the back of the computer. I had missed that set of connectors entirely. Chagrinned, I rang off.
Now the computer booted fine, and the video looked good. I proceeded with the setup, which went normally.
I plan on installing an OWC 32 TB PCIe SSD array. The computer was advertised as having 5 PCIe slots, but I could only see four, and there were no slots open. The Nvidia A6000 is eating up two slots. The Bluetooth/WiFi card takes another (I had no idea when I said I wanted Bluetooth and WiFi I was costing myself a PCIe slot). The Intel dual 10GbE card takes another, and it’s installed in one of the only two 16x slots (the other is taken by the A6000). A Thunderbolt 3 interface takes up the last of the 8x slots. So something has to go to allow me to install the PCIe SSD. It needs a 16x slot, so the Intel 10 GbE card is the leading candidate for sacrifice. That decision is made a lot easier by the fact that the motherboard seems to support 10 GbE.
I’ll get to the OWC SSD array installation in another post. The rest of this one is about SATA SSD’s. The computer has two hot-swap front SATA slots. They appeared to be wired, which you can’t always count on with Dell. I got a couple of Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB SATA drives and installed them in the Dell sleds. The Disk Administrator software saw them just fine.
I et up the two Samsung drives for striping under the OS, and I ran a benchmark:
For comparison, here are the results for the Dell internal SSD:
About five times as fast.
I downloaded SoftRAID, set up the two Samsung drives for striping, and I ran the benchmark again:
Windows striping is just about as fast as SoftRAID striping, in this case.
Using the Windows File Manager, I started to copy over 16 TB of data from a USB-C spinning rust array that I’d been using for about a year. After a couple of hours, The file manager threw an error:
I tried again using GoodSync as the transfer software. It ran for a while, and started seeing errors, too:
I got a little more information about the errors:
It wasn’t clear to me which device was causing the error. Since I’d been using the spinning rust array for a long time, I decided that the most likely causes were the Samsung drives or the SoftRAID software.
I broke the array using SoftRAID and reformatted the disks as a spanned volume under Windows. The formatting took more than 24 hours.
I fired up GoodSync and started another transfer. This one failed after a couple of minutes.
I tried to access the spinning rust array. No go:
Looks like the problem is with the formerly reliable OWC disk array. I power cycled it, and it worked for a few minutes, then quit again.
GoodSync has a peer-to-peer networking feature. I used that to transfer the data.
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