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 last time I tried to use it on this machine. It started fine this time.
I removed the Intel 10 GbE card — I still have the 10 GbE port on the motherboard — and installed the OWC full length card. Dell lets you do this without tools. I have to dress some cables out of the way, since there were no full length cards installed at that point, and it looks like Dell didn’t expect the user to install any.
On the reboot, I restarted SoftRAID, and had it scan for drives and RAIDs. It didn’t find any drives that it could use. It did find one array, but it was 0 bytes. I called OWC support, and they told me to remove the partitions and volumes on all 8 SSDs using a command line Windows tool. When I did that, OWC could see the drives, and I had it format them all into a single RAID 0 drive.
Then I ran the ATTO benchmark:
More than 50 Gb/s for large transfers. Pretty spiffy.
Compare that to the Dell-installed M.2 SSD:
Looks like the striping isn’t buying much.
However, there was a problem. Towards the end of the benchmark, I heard something that sounded like a bad fan bearing. I ignored it for the time being, and started to populate the drive:
The bearing noise grew worse. And now you can hear it even when you’re not using the SSD array.
I called OWC support, and arranged for a card swap.
The next morning, when I rebooted the workstation so that I could clear the SSD array before sending it back (I shut it down because I couldn’t stand the fan noise), neither SoftRAID nor the Windows Disk Administrator could find it.
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