Once again, I’m trying to cram a consumer graphics card into an “enterprise” Workstation. This time it’s a Dell Precision 7960 Tower from eBay, with a w9-3495x CPU, 128 GB RAM, and two 1TB SSDs (one of which I’m upgrading to a 4TB Samsung 9100 Pro). As best I can tell, the MSI Inspire 3X is one of the few consumer GPUs that will clear the height constraints of the case (an RTX 5070 Ti here, but you can also get a 5080 in the same form factor).

Also, I put on the tin foil hat to talk about how consumer graphics cards are probably bigger than they have to be to protect Big GPU.

Storage Driver

To download the driver for the on-board disk controller, go to Dell’s support site here:

https://www.dell.com/support/product-details/en-us/product/precision-t7960-workstation/drivers

(I don’t want to link directly to the actual driver, as it may have been updated to a later version by the time you read this.)

• Select Storage Controller from the Category dropdown.
• This should bring back a result for Intel Virtual RAID on CPU Driver. (This is correct even if you’re not using RAID mode.)
• Download that EXE and run it.
• Select the option to Extract, not install.
• Extract it to a USB stick.
• Attach that USB drive to the system on which you’re installing Windows 11.
• Install the driver called “” in the folder “\F6\IntelVROC_f6_iaStorE_win10_64\”. (That worked on my system, but if it doesn’t work on yours, try the other driver listed.)
• Note: It may depend upon whether you have RAID enabled in BIOS. I probably shouldn’t have.)
• You’ll know it worked if/when you see your NVMe drive(s) listed as options on which to install Windows.

Taking a look at a Dell-branded LTO Ultrium 8 external SAS tape drive that I got new in box from eBay. (It’s actually an IBM drive and enclosure, as it turns out.) Paired the drive with an HPE MicroServer G10+ v2 that was also a NIB eBay find. Turns out it’s not the right machine with which to use this, but at least was enough to get the drive tested.

In this video I try to test out the Icy Dock ToughArmor M.2 NVMe Mobile Rack for PCIe slots. It supports 2 removable NVMe drives placed in the included sleds, and (almost) fits an x8 or x16 lane PCIe slot that supports bifurcation to get 4 juicy lanes to each of the SSDs. I test it out with Samsung 990 Pro and Western Digital SN850X 4TB drives.

That being said, it turns out that not all bifurcation implementations are created equal, nor are all PCIe slots. Hence the frustrating aspect. Buy it with a generous return policy in place, if you buy it at all.

Just to be 100% clear: This is not sponsored in any way. If you couldn’t tell from the length of the video and the conclusion. But anyways, I paid for it out of pocket and bought it for my own purposes.

Oh yeah, at the very end there’s an update to my video on using the Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 as a backup “server” with 18x 20TB disks.

In this video I create a new backup server from a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 with 18x 20TB Seagate Exos refurbished drives. Also there’s some more ranting about backups in general. But idk, there are chapters so you can skip to whatever. And it’s not technically a server, in that it doesn’t serve files. It’s really more of a client that takes files from other servers and holds onto them. But I call it a backup server because hardware-wise it’s a server. Anywho, that’s the description. It’s probably not optimal for the YouTube algorithm, but hey, I’m not an influencer even though I have a TikTok account that I don’t use.

For posterity, here’s a transcript of the video in case you’d rather read than listen. But beware! It’s as transcribed by YouTube and so may include some errors and lack of punctuation (and etc).

hi everybody I’m Scott and this is a poweredge t640 with an 18 drive capacity up front uh you can see it’s got space for six up here and then some blanks for two rows of six more below that this is going to be my new backup server this monitor shows that it’s been under test for this is bad to look at one second well it’s still dim but yeah it’s been under test for almost 24 hours and because this is an eBay special and by special I mean it’s just fine it’s not like I don’t mean that in negative way got off eBay because I’m you know it’s a little bit of an older machine I think the t640 has been around for a while but this particular model is from 2021 so as of recording this it’s only about 3 years old which actually makes it one of the newer systems I’ve had down here in a while the reason it’s new isn’t because it’s particularly great it’s only with silver CPUs I think 8 core 2.1 GHz the CPUs aren’t important because this thing is not going to be doing anything CPU intensive if you couldn’t guess from the front of it it’s going to be doing something dis intensive and that is backing up because I said it’s a backup server and what do I mean by that it’s basically just going to be a file server only it’s not going to be accessible from the outside it is only going to pull files into it from other servers for the purposes of backups and it’s also I’m not going to reside in my basement I have a closet upstairs on the second floor of my house that currently has two computers and a disc array yeah there it is uh kind of teetering on top of one of the computers and those are both obviously homebuilt machines they’re nothing fancy whatsoever spec-wise in fact they’re pretty awful but they just have a ton of discs not enough discs though and that is the reason for this guy because one of them is completely full on space and the other one’s getting close yeah as of right now I have some video F that aren’t even getting backed up which I don’t like this guy will be paired with 18 drives oh I should get the drives most important part of the project is the [ __ ] drives but I forgot them these are the aforementioned drives right here well it’s a box these drives were another eBay purchase and right here we have 400 terabytes of raw storage in the form of these see gate exos I’m assuming that’s how you pronounce that x22 drives 20 tab a piece and there are 20 of them as I said before this is an 18 Bay chassis so obviously it’s two extra drives but that’s good because these were sold as refurbished in other words used I don’t think they’re manufacturer refurbished Al they do look like they’re in really good condition and I got them obviously much cheaper than new drives of this capacity so while it’s a risk I visited a well visited that sounds weird I found a couple of posts on Reddit about people who bought these drives or similar drives from the same seller who sells them in bulk and they all had good experiences this was on groups like uh serve the home and some other Enthusiast groups let’s say who generally know what they’re talking about and probably wouldn’t spam that for no reason so yeah hopefully these are okay I’m going to test them out obviously before I put them in production this is for a home backup server that’s why I put production in quotes and I should note that most of the data it’s going to be back up to these drives is on This Server right here and this dis array right here and between the two of those there’s about 150 terabytes of storage that are that’s in use and even those are getting kind of full so I’m probably going to be upgrading them soon as well maybe with more drives from the seller if they work out so it’s a lot of data it’s a lot of video files and obviously with this much storage on the backup server it’ll be more than enough to back that up and plus I have some other servers dis images database server backups stuff like that that are all going to go on this machine as well as another off-site machine I didn’t mention the reason this is upstairs is in case the basement floods or there’s a fire or something at least presumably This Server would be unaffected being two stories up in a completely different part of the house it’s not a huge house but still it’s uh at least out of the basement and that’s why I also have off-site backup servers just in case the whole house burns down um I would lose some of my Roll video files and some other stuff that’s not Mission critical or hyper Mission critical but uh most my important data would be safe there and elsewhere as well and I’m trying to get more serious about my backup so uh not long from now I’ll have a video featuring these backup tapes because I have a lot of data that exists but doesn’t change a lot so I just want to back it up once store it off site on tape and this way uh a lot less concerned about hard drives failing so the first step before I can test all 20 of these drives or rather 18 at a time is to take them out of their baggies put them in sleds get the sleds caddies whatever you want to call them loaded into the server and I’m going to be running this this has I think an h330 a perk h330 card which is a RAID card I’m going to be using it in HBA mode so these will just be treated as a jbod just a bunch of discs and the OS will see each disc individually so I can use Smart modon Tools check the status of these drives see how old they are see how many hours they have on them Etc and the real burning test for these drives is simply going to be to create a raid array and I’m going be using software raid obviously Linux software raid and that’s raid six now thing I’m struggling with is it’s a really bad idea to put 18 20 terab drives in one big fat array

[Music] and that really comes down to drive failures during array rebuilds is with raid six you can withstand up to two Drive failures before data loss on the third drive failure so you say h it’s no big deal take the drive out the bad Drive put a new good drive in starts rebuilding that’s great the problem is that when you do that it puts all the discs in the system under heavier than normal load because this server is going to be under very low load normally if a disc is going to fail it’s probably going to fail under load especially at higher temperatures when the entire Drive cage gets a little hotter from all these drives working not working their asses off because you know they’ll be reading anyway the point is whole thing gets warmer drives work harder another Drive is more likely to fail during the rebuild than at any other time and besides this is just a certain probability that drive will fail at any time with a 20 tbte drive to rebuild assuming a 100 megabyte per second let’s say of uh data streaming into the drive so let’s say that’s 100 megabytes per second going into the drive that’s a gigabyte every 10 seconds a terabyte every 10,000 seconds and 20 terabytes every 200,000 seconds a day is 86,400 seconds so it’s going to take two and a half days call it under optimal conditions to rebuild one drive in the array is second Drive goes bad you replace that in the middle of the rebuild it’s probably going to slow things down overall so you’re probably I mean in theory it might not but it probably will so then you’re talking even longer to do the second Drive rebuild while the first drive is still rebuilding you’re putting the whole array under load for even longer another Drive failing is a definite possibility the question is do I split this up into two n dis arrays or just go for the Gusto and do one big fat 18 Drive raid six array it’s inadvisable but the difference is of course with two raid six arrays you have two parody drives uh two more parody drives than you would otherwise which is 40 terabytes of less usable storage to put another way with an 18 Drive array you have two parity drives and 16 data drives which is 320 terabytes of usable storage it’s less when formatted but let’s just say for round numbers about 300 terabytes of usable storage if I split it up into two n dis Aries that’s only 14 drives of uh data total which is 280 terabytes call it 260 formatted maybe 250 so yeah it it’s really do I want to lose that extra 40 terabytes of storage I’m thinking I’m going to take the risk and that’s only because because I wouldn’t advise you do this necessarily the only reason I think I’m going to take that risk is because I have an off-site backup server my main servers are all at least raid six I have raid Z3 I’m using ZFS on the server behind me so it’s really only in the event of catastrophic failure and plus I’m going to be doing tape backups and storing the tape securely off site so I’m not super concerned about having this fail contemporaneously with the catastrophic failure of the server down here anyway I’m still on the fence we’ll see at first I’m just going to put 18 drives in here we’re going to test the 18 drives I’m going to build an 18 disc raid six at first just to burn in the discs because that array rebuild will take quite a lot of time and work the discs pretty thoroughly and then run some tests on it man 400 terabytes is heavy though oh and with software raid an 18 Drive raid six or two nine Drive raid sixes but one thing you might notice is a problem is that with the 18 drives I’m not putting the OS on those discs those are just going to be data drives there are internal USB ports in here I think I actually don’t know well anyway it doesn’t matter if they’re internal USB ports I have booted servers like this off of USB sticks internally I like to have all my discs externally accessible both for ease of swapping out and just to see the little blinking lights it’s a thing I have so you might notice there’s a 5 and a qu Drive Bay up here unfortunately unlike Dell 740 XDS they and maybe even some regular 740s this does not have any Drive Bays on the back I don’t think you can even spec that with their Tower line so what I did get is an icy Dock Drive cage which holds six 2.5 in drives this comes with a couple of fans on the back and it fits into one 5 and a qu Drive Bay which non- coincidentally is of course what we have up here it’s meant for an optical drive when you order it from Dell that’s usually what they would throw into that slot but this will go in there instead and this is nothing fancy there’s no Active Electronics in here it’s just a pass through it has two set of power connectors in the back I think it’s just connected like one of those for triplet of drives on either side and as you can see it has six SATA ports so those are just passrs um it’s a there’s just a dumb back plane back there the only other thing you might notice is this switch labeled HLA which I believe is the fan mode switch high low or Auto I’m heavily considering just taking these fans off completely because as I’ll show you later inside the chassis of the t640 there’s a fan right behind the 500 Quin Drive Bay that should pull air through this at least relatively nicely and I believe I’m only going to use the middle to Bay for the 2os disc I don’t think I’m going to use any other Drive bays in here so those will have decent air flow and a good amount of air gap between them and any other surface in here and plus they’re only they’re they’re going to be used like almost never you know like some log files are going to get written to them and they’ll really only get red from when the thing is booting up which will be extremely rare so these ssds are not going to get a lot of use so I don’t really care about thermal properties too much and just in case you’re curious here is actually doesn’t have the model number but that that’s what I got anyway there’s no model number on here and I was just assuming that that is fan speed high low Auto yeah high low Auto um high is 100% low is 60% and auto is the fan will start at low setting at increased speed depending on the hard drive temperature well who’s putting hard drives in this now if the hard dis Drive exceeded over 40° Centigrade room temperature 25° the fan will increase its speed to maximum I don’t know where the temperature sensor in here would be but like I said I I think I’m just going to omit the fans entirely that’s because these do not look like particularly high quality fans so they’re likely to stop working anyway or at least make annoying noises eventually if not immediately and noise is another thing that highly recommends this chassis um I ran it through that memory test even under load super quiet quieter than any of the servers behind me in that rack and I’ve used this is my first t640 but I’ve had a t is that can you see it behind me no it’s on the top of this rack it’s not in use right now is a t620 I had t710 before that and even a t605 point is that the tower servers are generally much much quieter than the rack servers and that’s by Design because these are really for a more small to mediumsized business Market where they might not have a dedicated data room or even closet and this might be in the same room as employees so it’s highly desirable for this to be nearly silent I mean for those of you that are really particular that want like a zero DB gaming chassis this wouldn’t satisfy you it’s not like completely silent but it’s got you know these are bigger fans than you would find in even a two rack unit server and they’re just a bit chunkier as well so they can move more air at a lower RPM yeah a lot of fan blades and well this is what they look

like actually what manufacturer is this oh foxcon and even for Server Chassis uh fans do make a huge difference the big file server back the big file server back there it’s a super micr chest the fans it came with were super loud and annoying I think they’re even a little smaller than this they were like the type of the size of fans you’d find like a 2 Ru system because it’s basically two rack unit systems kind of stacked on top of each other in one shell more well more or less anyway point is fans were super loud and annoying I replaced them with this brand which I can’t remember but this is yeah and I didn’t modify anything the BIOS didn’t modify anything in the fans it was just a different brand different model of fan much quieter I mean like probably makes 20% the noise it did originally but air flow is still good uh temperatures didn’t go up and manufacturer I had that experience with a Dell server as well it shipped with some other brand of fan I replaced it with Delta fans that were actually speced by Dell they even came with the right uh pin out and the right connector on it for hot swapping this was in an r90 five I believe and again made the system much quieter it was just a different brand different manufacturer different blade design made all the difference in the world even though they were also official Dell Replacements so manufacturers tend to swap out fan brand so i’ I’ve seen a lot of arguments online like people are like oh that that that server is super loud it’s it’s very annoying I don’t know how you could say that’s a quiet server and someone else is like no no no I have one it’s it’s super quiet it’s great and then they chalk it up to a disagreement usually about like what each person thinks quiet is you know is a quiet machine 30 DB is it 40 DB is it 50 like what relatively speaking what do you consider quiet I have a suspicion that sometimes they’re buying the same exact model of server maybe even the same year of production but they came with different fans and they make a huge difference so if you got a noisy server before you go to any crazy modifications check eBay see if you can find some other brands of fan you can usually get them pretty damn cheap if they’re used you could test them out for yourself yeah obviously I don’t know offhand which fans the best and which are not but yeah yeah and probably even model to model from the same manufacturer might make a huge difference I’m not a fan aerodynamicist but I know from empirical experience it makes a huge difference rant over this chassis was nice and quiet quiet enough for my purposes we’ll see though we’ll see when it has 18 drives spinning up front generating heat and that heat being sucked through the chassis we’ll see how much more those fans spool up and how much louder it gets I have a fairly high tolerance for noise if you couldn’t tell let me turn off the noise reduction on this microphone that’s what it sounds like down here and I work down here and do all sorts of crap that’s why my voice might sound a little funny because I got to use a [ __ ] ton of noise reduction even though I’m using the right mic for the job that’s why I have this mic I don’t know 3 cm 2 cm from my face or my mouth hole it’s it’s on my face my mouth Hole uh who the [ __ ] calls it a mouth hole it’s like 2 cm from my mouth so obviously that will be the loudest noise it picks up background noise will be much quieter relative to my talking at this distance because most of the noise is coming from 10 12T back there the point is still too loud down here but not for me I don’t mind it as long as I’m not trying to record a video that’s not an h330 I think this might have an h740p in it actually all right so now uh I guess I’ll put the drives into caddies into time lapse and uh you guys call them caddies trays or sleds I usually call them caddies even though I don’t think that’s the correct term because I like cdrom Cades from back in the day um that’s my earliest like memory of refering to something like that so I I call them caddies but trays sleds whatever point is this did not the server did not come with them so I’m hoping I have 18 of them uh that fit the style chassis I’m pretty sure I do and weirdly the t640 uses the previous generation style of trays even though the r 740s i have use the uh newer style of tray don’t know why so I need 18 of these guys at least I’m 90% sure I need 18 of these guys yes 18 of these oh that’s one two 7

that’s actually just about perfect I think cuz I think all I got is E7 but I have one more trick up my sleeve I’m just whipping out my cell phone for Simplicity and oh boy does not like my fancy blue lighting um this that’s not my label this is how it came from an eBay seller

but not using this chassis right now and it’s got 12 trays perfect and this is a dr4100 in case you’re curious which I think is a r 730 XD pretty much woohoo and that’s 12 more okay so that’s actually 19 right there but this way I know I have some let’s say not actual Dell uh you know knockoffs from eBay floating around here and those I had a I had a bad run with those where the spring that retracts the Button had a uh clip that would snap off and then the button would never retract and would just stay down and this thing would just flap like that and you could kind of cool it back into place but that was a pain so if any of these are defective at least I have one extra and some of them are a little Dusty these were some of these were used in my home environment obviously not the ones from that server I just took them out of those are pretty clean so that’s

good oh yeah I need screws as well fortunately I have a relatively comprehensive collection of screws from over the years and I think yeah I bought a bunch of these in bulk for mounting 3.5 in drive to sleds these are kinds with the fluted heads um nope oh there’s our Visa

Mount standoffs I was hoping I had more I got more down there I could probably pick through it because I don’t think this is going to be enough I got 18 drives times four screws a piece is 72 screws and that does not look like 72 screws it says 424 uh times 3.5 in but I don’t think this bag is full I think I’ve already used some of these Anyway come on Scott let’s get this over with in the time lapse you’re you’re probably going to see me putting three screws in each tray CU look this isn’t an Enterprise environment I don’t give a crap as long as you have one screw and one screw on the end where the connector is by and large it’s going to be fine I’ll probably I’ll put three you know two on this end and then one either here or here and it’ll be more than enough to hold the drives and whatever oh and I almost forgot another thing you’re going to see me do is label the drives because I’m going to be using software raid the LED indicators on the front of the chass seat you’re not going to tell me which Drive is bad if a drive goes bad I’ll need to determine that through software and I’ll need to either look for the serial number of the bad drive or see which serial number is absent from the list of drives or you know whatever you can see here these are both software rate arrays actually so is this one and yeah those are the drive serial numbers really handy when replacing them I mean another way to determine which Drive is bad just to use the array and see which activity light is not flashing and that’s probably your bad drive but only probably so you’re better off knowing for sure interesting these say date of manufacturer 26th of September 2023 this video is being recorded in May of 2024 so less than a year old at least that’s probably their refurb date but still that’s a good sign I’ve actually had in my life very good luck with refurb drives from both Western Digital and Seagate in fact I found that Seagate refurbs tend to not fail but Seagate regular drives do and I know we can argue about which is better Western Digital or seate personally and back Blaze statistics back me up on this um generally speaking seates consumer low-end drives are much worse than Western digitals drives that being said seates Enterprise Drive Line which I think these are is usually in my experience anyway topnotch but all I can say from my personal experience and you know you could argue this all you want in the comments in my entire life I’ve had many more Seagate failures than Western Digital failures even though I prefer Western Digital and usually buy those so in other words I’ve owned more WD drives but have had more seates fail in other words I’ve done more Seagate r rmas or just you know throw them in the trash than Western diges even though I’ve had a lot more Western diges over the years and hdst also really good uh both before and after the Western Digital acquisition so the way I like to label them is on the first line I put 20 terabytes because eventually years and years from now 20 terab drives might be harder to get than like 22 or 24 terab drives so I might have a mix of capacities even if I’m only using 20 TB per Drive in the array and then the serial number is pretty short so I’m just going to put the whole thing on two lines and then the only irritating thing is this label maker does look it’s my favorite label maker or at least these are my favorite labels but it does waste a lot you can’t control the margins you can’t control how much extra it ex fuds unlike some other label makers which are a lot more uh generous with the amount of label you actually get to use so I got to cut off the extra margin make it small enough to fit on the drive tray and then they’re oriented like this in the chassis so that is going to go roughly there and obviously I don’t care about fitting it within the margins of the original Dell label like no I want a nice big legible marking on there even though it got a little [ __ ] up there but whatever I usually just do a quick double check uh zx20 yez zx20 yez because if you get it wrong in the label that can cause real confusion when you’re going to replace

it not the most ergonomic way to do this but and voila only 177 more to go populating a large array like this and having to put all these drives into

caddi is both something I dread doing and something that I sort of weirdly enjoy doing it’s like very calming very Zen relaxing in a way so yeah let’s uh skip to the time lapse and some music and uh be done with this in a jiffy from your perspective

d

[Music]

[Applause] Ed. note: There is no applause in this video whatsoever. WTF?

[Music]

[Music] and that’s the last one how long did that take I don’t even know it’s on the screen though because the video is keeping track well it’s not the best view in the world but let’s at least see the last one

Ah that’s satisfying okay so now we got 18 discs obviously I got two more drives down there in that box those will be spares I’ll test those in a separate enclosure like a USB you know what I mean anyway it’s already getting kind of late here I really just wanted to get these drives in the system so I can get them testing overnight like I said testing is just going to be building an array so I’m going to boot off love a live version of a buntu off this USB stick configure The Raid array like I said all 18 discs get it set up as raid six and get started building and just leave it overnight tomorrow I will put in the OS discs show you around the inside of the chass in case you’re curious and um [ __ ] one more thing oh we’ll test power consumption I I didn’t test it beforehand which is probably dumb but what I can do is just sort of like you know half pop out all the drives just pull out like that test the power consumption without the drives then test it with the drives so yeah let’s get this uh get this full booted up

oh you can’t see it from your angle but right I took the side panel [Music] off oh yeah what we got to do is change change this to HBA [Music] mode and I’ll have to set up the ID leader but like I said this is just to get the machine up and running enough to build a raid array and to make sure all discs are recognized actually [Music]

uh block probing did not discover any discs oh actually I remember reading online somebody somewhere said that you need to cold boot the system in order to uh get the RAID controller to switch to HBA mode I’m hoping that’s the problem um I’ve pulled power cables yeah there they are so let me try booting [Music]

[Applause] again uh oh terminal there we go g honestly I I don’t really run Linux servers with a guey like ever so this is

awkward

Yeehaw H oh good that is installed at least

okay uh s must be the USB stick right

so yeah good okay just want to make sure now it’s usually wise to partition the dries first but since this just for testing I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this array ultimately um I’m just going to I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s level six in that case but whatever oh oops that’s supposed to be I’m an idiot equals

18 e okay well that’s cool I mean I guess this resolution is good for video so you guys can read this but man um okay 0% complete clean resyncing 16

devices by the way this is just in the difference between these two is whether you consider a kilobyte to be a bytes or 1024 bytes and so forth all the way up to terabyte that’s why those numbers are different but it’s it represents the same amount of bits ultimately well this is going to be useless at this resolution right um yeah because it’s cutting off the freaking

percentage well that’s not so bad then and then I will just leave this up all night uh just for the record it is oh good timing actually so I started that just about 300 a.m. um you can see the system time says 7 a.m. on May 19th it’s 3:00 a.m. New York time May 19th obviously I didn’t set up the time zone on this correctly anyway so yeah I’ll just uh Leave This Server running overnight and we’ll we’ll see how far that gets in the next 10 12 hours or so oh and I almost forgot Blinky lights

oo oo I’m I’m looking at a screen over there that’s why I’m

yeah that’s very nice so until tomorrow I’ve been Scott still be Scott tomorrow I don’t know why I said that bye sometime as is now past just a quick update here you can see the LEDs are still blinking it’s been I think 23 hours since I started the array build and it is 48% complete so we’re probably looking at about 2 Days full 48 hours is which is actually a little faster than I thought it would be which is

nice uh let’s go 10 oh my

God there we go so yeah it’s writing at about 1110 megabytes per second so yeah a little faster than 100 megabytes I gave a credit for originally so that’s cool I kind of just wanted to check the performance of this operation and by the way that’s 110 megabytes per dis which is about 2 gbt per second uh from through the HBA which is really good that’s like 16 gigabit uh what kind of load is this putting on the system 100% CPU so it’s CPU bound but it still seems like it’s probably maxing out the discs as well which is kind of improbable but well anyway just want to take a look at that as it’s going um I’ll check back in either tomorrow or probably the next day because it should finish about 26 hours from now maybe and it’s going to be super late at night then so once this is done we’ll take a look at the chass itself install the OS discs install an OS and get it actually syncing the uh files from the server oh the other thing I wanted to see was

uh

uh forgot oh

yeah yes that is one of the discs obviously uh what is it d a for everything yeah that’s what I wanted oh frig well that’s not

good all right well then if that random ass Reddit post I just looked at is correct then it’s actually zero yeah I knew it was something with the seate drives okay yeah okay okay okay cool now these are referb drives so who knows what their situation was be before I assume this was factory reset um I mean the 28 hours is probably just me I’m assuming these came with zero hours on the clock so uh yeah okay we’ll we’ll just stick with that I’m back it’s been a few days cuz I got busy with work and you know real life stuff but the array did finish building successfully uh the drive seemed to be fine still not seeing any Smart errors everything looks great so fa confident these drives are good drives but only time will really tell for that all right get the keyboard and stuff out of the way and then install the ssds in the 5 and a/4 inch Drive Bay in the IC do whatever it’s called oh and to go into this enclosure I just got two old ssds I haven’t been using for a while this one’s 250 gig and this one I think is 120 or8 gig it doesn’t matter if they’re different sizes I really don’t need more than like a couple of gig for the OS partition anyway so you know cuz I’m just going to run these in software raid one and I’ll just create a 120 gig uh boot drive you know the various partitions boot partition and the uh OS partition and I guess swap too why not have some swap even though it doesn’t matter

this enclosure is Metal by the way it’s not a plastic shell which I like a lot and it kind of Clicks in in the front like it’s got these two little

pins that go into the screw holes on the bottom and then by the connector that’s where two actual screws goes I guess I’ll use the included screws rather than digging into my own stash oh I’m getting ahead of myself one thing I’d like to do is get the serial numbers off the drives just so if they do die and I have to replace one of them I know which is which I could just call one I could just label one sand disc and one PNY and that would probably be enough but you know by tradition I go with serial numbers so I’ll stick with

that and and you know what I’m actually going to print two copies of each because the drives are going to be obscured on the bottom by the case so this way I can put one label on top of the disc and know which is which because I do want to be able to fit on the front of one of these bays and uh that’s kind of silly yes so I use that as the top label for it I’ll cut it off to oh I have all the same amount of digits as that one hey I got the same amount of digits well roughly I mean the font spacing is little the it’s not fixed with font so who knows and now I don’t care about these SSD specs in particular um I’m not concerned with performance because this is just going to be used to boot and write a few small log files too I’m more concerned with reliability and of course with ssds long-term reliability comes down to right Cycles but these drives are also not going to be written to a hell of a lot so it doesn’t matter if they’re a little old and used I mean they’ve been gently used I don’t think these are um strongly used

drives but the point here is just reliability from having a raid one just in case one dies of random causes not so much due to fatigue and there we go now I’m not going to apply the label to well actually you know what I will because I’m not worried about well no it’s GNA make this not pop out easily because it’s thicker than this and it’ll obscure the drive LED I’ll put this on the uh Drive Bay below this one because I’m only going to have two drives in this enclosure yeah why why is it like sticking out maybe I should have uh that’s as far back as the uh Drive will go in the sled it’s still it’s still proud of the ones without drives in them but I guess those can just sink deeper I don’t think that’s a problem as long as it’s seated in the connector that’s all that really matters

I’m such a spaz I put the label on the wrong I had it upside down the whole

time I wonder how many of you noticed that like could I have just edited that part out and then no one would ever know who knows now of course if I was fully populating this unit with drives uh it would be a bad idea to label all them this way and block up all the air flow you know even if they’re mostly going to be read drives it will generate some heat I think we’ll still get some air flow off these top vents yeah I’d probably figure out an alternate way of labeling for example I have an icy dock enclosure similar to this behind me well you guys can’t see it but it’s right about there yeah there it is and as you can see I just labeled all six drives next to the unit and that worked out fine now as for this again I’m concerned about the reliability and noise of these fans so I’m thinking this Dell chassis has a lot of fans in it and has pretty good air flow front to back and these drives are not going to be working terribly hard anyway oh those are just some chewy screws those are not going into metal at all I can guarantee these are going into plastic just from the feel of them not saying the whole thing is metal but like uh yeah like this whole back plate from this seam wrapping around just to here is all plastic yeah I mean they don’t they don’t feel great they don’t feel super cheap like I’m not saying they’re awful I’m just saying that the Dell server has a whole ton of fans in it and why not let them do their jobs and the reason I’m completely removing the fans is just so that there’s a bit more room for airflow without the fan blades obscuring part of that when they’re not moving so so whatever air flow chassis does pull through this um you know it’ll be easier to pull the air through I guess also it makes cabling a little easier because we don’t have the fans right up tight next to those SATA connectors I think it’s the right move for this

application and of course we don’t throw out screws ever and then these are presumably the screws for mounting it in the 5 and a quarter Drive Bay I guess I don’t know why this why are there so many screws wait what does it think these screws are for 10 pan head screws for device yeah I guess they want you to put 10 screws to mount this thing one two uh three four yes there’s eight but oh it says two oh I missed that it clearly says two for spare parts but still I I don’t know who would actually put in put this in with five and the really short for getting past like the sheet metal of the case and then actually getting a bite into this unit so I don’t know man I’m just not uh not going to use them oh my God no this is thing’s heavy now I mean it was slightly heavy before I put the drives in it but now it’s it’s freaking massive but uh so I might before I bring this upstairs to the second floor I might take out all the drives I’m sorry my uh hands are so bright oh actually yeah I’m sorry my hands are so bright but I need to up the gain on the camera to make the interior of the chassis visible to you guys because obviously I have most of my lights on the other side and perhaps unwisely not so many lights on this side but you’ll get the idea hopefully so we got these uh pcie card retention brackets it’s for tall cards they don’t rattle around uh not really necessary for me just uh I’ll probably just omit

those all right so of course up here we got the 5 and a qu Bay and this should be tooless to remove this front plate yeah there we go basically this is just a dummy bezel like a drive bay cover but really large and as you can see it has these screws that I have a bit of a standoff of unthreaded uh length and so we’ll be using these screws to mount the icy

dock

there and so it’s two on this side oh and so it’s two on this side and one on that side and now these interesting but fortunate for me these are the fine threaded screws the type you’d find on like CD ROM drives and stuff uh not the old school 5 and A4 inch Drive Bay like where they use the coarse thread screws so because fine head screws is what this uses they’re fine thread not fine

head oh that’s why the screws were so short that I came

with is these are too long the problem is these are sort of specialty screws now you can use normal screws and just not drive them in all the way but let’s see if I have a shorter version of those exact screws yeah I got more of them but the uh the threads look like they’re about the same length yeah they’re identical so uh and I’m wondering if this one that I did put in is so long that it would interfere with this bottom Drive Bay but I don’t really care because I’m not using it so the problem is these in the back are digging into the plastic bezel back here and might even yeah I don’t think I can drill deeper because it might hit the side of one of these SATA ports so that that’s not B that’s not a problem I mean back in the days of mechanical hard drives or Optical drives you’d want to make sure that your drives are locked down in a fairly sturdy fashion so that they don’t vibrate which could cause problems you want them really uh connected to the chassis quite sturdily but with ssds I mean who cares they’re not going to vibrate and even the chassis experienced vibration who gives a [ __ ] it’s not going to interfere with the operation of an SSD in theory it could could shake a port loose or something but let’s face it this computer is going to be sitting on a shelf in a cabinet and barring any earthquakes which we had recently in New York actually um it won’t be an issue I know I’ll admit it’s kind of a weird angle to show this to you but uh yeah there it is it doesn’t look half bad in the front of this chassis and uh it is a bit loose like it’ll just wiggle around a bit but it’s not going anywhere it’s not like going to pop out arbitrarily cuz it’s locked in by that screw being encumbered by this bracket as far as cabling goes I think I can take this out with the fan still in it yep these fans are modular from the air shroud but you can just pull the whole thing out that’s uh basically the gist of it mostly guides air over the CPUs and RAM but of course there are four fans in fact you can take out this entire

module and that’s what I was talking about when I said there’s good air flow through the chassis because it also has these four fairly beefy

fans we saw them earlier and oh I should point out air flows that way so when it’s situated like that in the chass see you can see this top fan does provide some suction through the 5 and 1/4 in Bay here we have the perk

H730 h740 yeah it’s just sort of sitting in there I don’t think it’s even yeah it’s not even locked down by a bracket or anything which is weird I think this is missing something we’re discovering things together because this uh the fan troud has this extra bracket coming up which holds the card in place so the card is not just freewheeling in there it’s actually a not prevented from going oh no it is prevented from going up there’s a notch there and then this lip holds it it keeps it up from Against Gravity so great so it has two SAS cables going up and over and then onto the back plane over here which of course holds the 18 drives and I think has a SAS expander under this heat sink and some beefy power cables going to it yeah I don’t know if I mentioned but this system did come with ah it’s Overexposed damn it it’s a lot of focus but 1100 watt psus 1100 watts is probably Overkill even for 18 SATA drives maybe for like 18 15K SAS drives or something it would be uh appropriate but and these uh silver CPUs that are relatively low power I think they have an 85 watt uh thermal design power yes these aren’t going to take too much power the drives will take the most power out of the whole system probably but it’s not going to be a lot but better to have over capacity on your power supplies than under capacity is my feeling so anyway yeah that’s the inside of the chassis this has uh 64 gigs so it’s got four 16 gig sticks and I I guess just for completeness the back of this is reminiscent of my Precision t79 7920 um and most of the that line in that it has four pcie slots here then the usual ports and power supplies and at the bottom four more I’m sorry five more pcie

slots so dual power supplies which for me is a must I like to put two UPS’s on any system like this um and also obviously in case one PSU dies this came with a Windows 2019 server license which I’m not going to use dedicated idra Port I think this came with Enterprise ID which is not terribly important uh four USB 3 ports two USB 2s I assume two uh 10 gig NX I I know says gigabit there but yeah they’re they’re 10 gigabit and obviously VGA and seral oh and should point out these bottom slots are labeled CPU 2 I I should imagine that means these would not be active without the second CPU populated I’ve never bought one of these I never bought a dual CPU system that didn’t have two CPUs in it so actually that’s a lie my Nas did but that wasn’t a dell and it didn’t have the same pcie configuration so yeah anyway all right and finally it’s still really too dark to see it up there but Behind These SAS cables are two SATA ports one’s already populated with a cable that just goes to the optical drive bay the other one’s unpopulated I’ll obviously stick my own Cable in there and wire it up to the back for those two drives the only thing I foresee as being an issue is do we have setup power oh yeah yeah it’s buried in there I have zoomed Us in so yeah there are the SAT uport it’s up here have the other end of that Sata cable and there is a man that was really tight there’s a retention clip in there that was hard to get to stic cables nice and long and I see a a power connector in there there we go Liberty and does it have a little extra it’s only the one though of course because this is only really supposed to have one Bay oh it also has an a small optical drive power cable uh this type yeah it says in order of function properly connect both 15 pin power connectors to the enclosure when using the device if I put the drives vertically on top of each other yeah I probably could have got away with one but you know what this has an angled connector anyway which isn’t ideal for putting in there so let me get a uh splitter all right I’ve got a lot of sat cables my SAT cable bin but here we go it’s a uh male to two females voila and then I’ll just sort of Tuck this all neatly up in there eventually

yeah it’s a locking connector that’s cool it’s longer than it needs to be but that’s okay it can just sort of curl up in there you know what it’s an absolute nightmare trying to get my big fat hands in there so since I got plenty of slack on these

cables I’m just going to connect them outside the chassis and then slide it back and it doesn’t matter which sat of connector goes to which drive but I am going to put HDD oh it’s labeled od0 which is the blue cable on the left side when you’re looking at the chassis from the front and that’s just for my own

neurosis and I guess technically it will help with troubleshooting or something yeah won’t matter it it won’t matter at all anyway there’s all the connections made up to the back of this unit all the connections we’re going to use anyway and then just gently guide the cables out of the way and click a lot of people would absolutely despise this mess and not be satisfied with it um at least for now I’m going to leave it like that make sure the front drive bay Works before I try tucking all these out of the way and to be honest with you I’ll probably leave it like this because it doesn’t matter it really doesn’t there’s still plenty of room around these cables for air flow like there’s not a high density of cables there so air is still going to be able to flow through this just fine I’m sure a lot of you are screaming at the prospect of it being left in this state but I kind of like that idea of someone out there feing over how awful this is and yet it working reliably anyway for years and years and years because what is literally going to happen inside this chassis with all these messy wires if no one disturbs it and I’ll be the only one who could possibly disturb it oh I’m a dumbass though because this does have to be tucked out of the way at least this cable does for the fan shoud to go back in place cuz of course that’s the other thing we need to ensure is that none of the fans get fouled on loose tables either like that can be bad that can be operationally problematic and I’m half kidding cuz that is why you want to keep your cables neat inside your chassis amongst other reasons anyway let’s see oh that’s actually yeah that’s got to go up and

over yep not pinching any cables none the cables are anywhere near the front of the fan which has this guard on it anyway so wonderful oh I’m an idiot this card is retained by the fan

troud and so thus concludes my physical assembly and rray builda of this 18 drive time 20 tbte massive Beast of 360 ter of raw storage um will be less once I decide how many parody drives I’m going to have in total in other words how many arrays I’m going to have in total because it’s going to be running raid six in either case and uh yeah the rest of it is just going to be loading an operating system on it I might just use a buntu I’m not sure just because it’s a long-term support and it’s just well supported and reliable and what I need ultimately from this machine is reliability I’m going to do a minimal install no gooey nothing fancy and the only things really loaded on this machine other than the really minimal OS and and tools is going to be um some scripts that I’ve already written for my other backup servers that’ll just modify slightly for this one and my backup strategy with these type of backup servers mostly consist of as I said earlier this is a client it’s not really a server technically um other than SSH which I have firewalled off so only I can access it from one of my machines down here has a private key on my machine and a password so it’s pretty secure in that regard that’s the only thing this will serve otherwise this is just a client it has an smv client an NTFS not NTFS client an NFS client and using rsync it just synchronizes other servers pulls its data down to it sometimes locally sometimes over a VPN if it’s a remote server that’s backing up and um yeah that’s basically it it it’s quite simple the only couple of mildly interesting things the backup scripts do is they retain uh for example if I’m backing up uh VM snapshots especially from offsite it will retain the last however many X number of snapshots I usually have it set to 30 so it has 30 days worth of snapshots of remote machine or a couple local machines too actually and those are just gz raw dis images taken from a snapshot when the backup begins so it’s kind of like backing up the machine in a crash state but you know 99% of the time that’s fine I do also back up my databases and other important applications at the application layer um in other words like I’ll use my SQL dump to dump all the contents out of my MySQL databases gzip those up and also get those backed up to this and other back servers uh it’s just much easier if like even though the machine is in a crash state if I can restore the whole VM image rather than having to do a a SQL Restore for example the SQL restore might take longer than just copying over a gzip file to the local server and then unzipping that and there you go so it will retain a few snapshots of whatever information I’m uh putting on it and for example with my file server at least for my main most important documents my programming projects um video projects that is the actual project files not all the raw video all of that also gets R synced over to one of these servers but then after it’s R sync successfully that night it gets then gzipped but not deleted just gzipped as a snapshot of that data and then that’s stored in a separate directory on the same server on the same backup machine the point of that being that this way if I get some kind of hor malware that either deletes or encrypts my files and then rsync decides to Oh all these files are changed and then sync over the encrypted files to the backup machine well that renders the backup machine kind of useless so I have these we’ll call them snapshots that I’ve just they’re just tar gzip of directory structures that are a point in time and I retain 30 days worth of those as well so yeah if I go 30 days without noticing uh a rans somewhere attack then yeah okay all those backups will be wiped out but for my most important data that’s how I do it I keep point in time backups uh usually daily for most of my important stuff and less important like uh virtual machine images like some of my personal servers that I don’t really modify or use that of or you know change data on that often uh those might get snapshotted weekly anyway the point is it’s not fancy but it’s reliable and so the reason for this giant ass machine being in my house on a different floor is twofold I mean one it back UPS it backs up video files which can be quite massive and be quite timec consuming to transmit over the Internet which is the other reason the inverse of that is if I need to restore the files from this machine when it’s in situ upstairs it’s going to be connected via a gigabit Ethernet connection but I could easily bring it downstairs and connect it to a 10 GB ethernet connection for the restore and I could even reconfigure this as a file server and then just access my files off of this machine and build a new backup server in the meantime you know what I mean it’s good having on premises backups like this just because it’s much faster for restores and that’s I would forewarn everyone if your backup strategy is exclusively backing up to the cloud you got to remember that in an urgent situation where you need to store your data if you have terabytes of data how long is that going to take just to download let alone like if it’s application Level backups will don’t actually put those backups onto each server they need to go on to yeah if it’s going to take you a week just to download all the data let alone restore it to various servers or whatever even if it’s just for home use like if your entire video libraries in the cloud and then you need like terabytes of it back for a project you might have to wait a couple of days I mean depending on the speed of your internet connection so I’d always recommend backing stuff up locally and remotely because of course if my house burns down if burglars actually manage to carry all this [ __ ] on their backs out of my house which is you know daunting I mean it’s daunting enough for me to manage all this stuff but yeah I mean that could happen so you have to be prepared for that too so offsite and on-site backups I think are the best move and the other thing about Cloud backups is that they’re so hard to verify like how like how do you know all your files truly exist on your cloud backup providers hard drives and they’re not just showing you you know you might log in and see here’s a list of all the files you have backed up and here’s all the versions of all those files we have backed up and oh it’s glorious look the files they’re right here but they could just be showing you entries in their database that don’t necessarily correlate to any actual files on any actual file system anywhere in their data center like not on purpose I’m not saying they’re a scam I’m just saying you don’t know how well their entire system is managed really like how often are they verifying the files that they’re displaying to you that they have logged in their database of files are actually stored somewhere because I’m assuming they abstract their file information from the actual file storage because otherwise I feel like it’ be a nightmare storing file files on all sorts of different servers and all sorts of different dis packs and then like trying to find them arbitrarily like there has to be some centralized Master list which is probably not a file system in anyway even if it is a file system how often is that file systems contents verified that exists and is in one piece you know in other words my point being you could have a catastrophic failure and go oh my God I got to go to my cloud backup provider and get all my files and then it could turn out that some or all of your files just aren’t there even though you thought they were and even if every now and then you’re smart and you go in and download a couple of arbitrary files here and there just to make sure they do exist I mean that verifies some of them but you don’t know that all of them exist unless you go and download all of them and look at them yourself which could take days or weeks depending on how much data you have stored and depending on the speed of your internet connection so at least with this first of all I know how it works I know there’s no abstraction between like the file system and the files that are stored I mean there is internally to the file system I suppose if you want to be pedantic but you know what I mean there’s not like a separate like I don’t know MySQL or couch DB instance that storing list of files expecting it to cor to uh correlate with file systems on various servers throughout their data center that’s really what I’m talking about when I’m talking about abstraction in that sense so I just feel more comfortable able having my data under my control and me knowing exactly how it’s stored and how it all functions end to end it just makes me feel better it’s more of a hassle definitely more of a hassle and more expensive in the end I mean back Blaze which is a backup provider I do recommend to friends and family and I have used it for other purposes as well um I do like back Blaze I I particularly like their transparency and their Drive stats that they publish so yeah not not not this is not a paid endorsement they didn’t sponsor this video or anything I give a crap whether you use them or not but uh generally speaking I do like them it’s just because they’re a cloud provider I don’t trust them not because they’re bad just because they’re not me but anyway point is back blaz subscription would be far cheaper than what this server costs and I’m pretty sure they offer unlimited storage to this day so in theory I could back up everything to back blazs for much much less money than this thing costs and probably for less money per month and this thing will cost a run in utility bills maybe but then again most of you probably don’t need this kind of absurd level of storage um honestly if you want something low power and quiet hook Raspberry Pi up to a couple of USB ssds and stick it in a closet somewhere you know assuming that’s enough storage for you um it’ be dead silent not use much power it could do its thing same sort of setup architecturally as I have here and you know your data is it’s in your closet and also offsite somewhere I mean back up to a cloud Prov for your off-site needs back up to a cloud provider I’m not saying don’t do that I’m just saying make yourself more comfortable and also back up locally and snapshots are very important because ransomware will murder you if you don’t have snapshots because otherwise you’re encrypted files will just get backed up and over and potentially depending on how you have your backups configured potentially overwrite your existing backups which is what would happen in my case if I wasn’t also tar gzipping all those files nightly and storing them in a time-coded timestamped file for 30 days worth of files that’s part of the reason why I need such a massive amount of space I mean right now I have approximately 150 terabytes of data here on the server behind me to back up which even with four parity drives would fill up less than half of this but there’s a lot of overhead in that I duplicate a lot of that data by keeping all those snapshots anyway I’ve done plenty of videos ranting on about backups for way too long but uh thanks for watching um maybe I’ll post a follow up to this once it’s up and running if I have any you know what if anything goes wrong I’ll probably post a Fallout video fixing this mess but uh if everything goes right then yeah this is just replacing two of my current backup servers in that closet which already have been doing their thing and running fine for I want to say one of the the one on the top shelf has probably been doing its thing now for8 years I don’t think I’ve upgraded that in a long time and the one in the bottom probably five years and they just hum away and they do their thing and those are made of very cheap parts this in theory should last a long time but we’ll see anyway I’ve been Scott uh good night why with the salute I always with the saluting I always [ __ ] salute

does anyone mind the saluting like should I keep doing that that was more of a doing of the cap the [ __ ] is no that’s a salute I did more of like a cap doing I never wear a hat I don’t know why I do that tip my Fedora that’s more like this you don’t like do you tip your now I don’t even remember do you tip your Fedora this way or do you tip your Fedora that way who knows it’s not even a thing it’s a meme I mean I think that fat actually did wear a fedora in that Meme for his own purposes I shouldn’t have said fat I’ll have to beep that out yeah you can’t make fun of people on the internet anymore though to be fair it would be inappropriate to randomly make fun of people in a video about the [ __ ] backup server right okay now I’m actually done

I just got my most expensive single computer ever. It’s an already-outdated Precision 7865 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 64-core CPU, direct from Dell. RAM upgrades from the manufacturer are always a bit of a rip, so in this video I upgrade it to 512GB. Also, I find out for the first time whether a consumer graphics card (PNY / NVIDIA RTX 4080 16GB) will actually fit inside the moderately-sized chassis. Oh, and fit two Western Digital Black SN850X 4TB SSDs to replace the woeful 256GB el cheapo card that came with the system from Dell.

Absolutely nothing in this is a paid ad. It was paid for by my wallet. Buy Dell, HP, Asus, even Razer for all I care.

And here’s the YouTube Generated Transcript of the entire video. Yeah, it’s a cheap shot at SEO, but in fairness it’s also legitimately the content. Also I guess you can read it if you don’t want to watch the video and imagine what’s going on:

Hi everybody, I’m Scott and this is the Dell Precision 7865, and if you’re familiar with the Dell product line the five at the end means it has an AMD CPU which is pretty unusual for Dell unfortunately.

And it’s not just any AMD CPU it’s a ryzen thread Ripper Pro 5995 WX which is the 64 core version (128 logical threads).

This is the first new computer I’ve got in quite a while obviously not the like first computer I’ve got in a while, as mostly everything I buy off eBay comes used. In fact, my current workstation is a Precision 7920 maybe 7910 E5 2697 V3 dual CPU so total of 28 cores.

It’s no slouch but I mean those CPUs are way old by now and the machine’s just not quite running like it should and mostly that’s because of the windows install and it’s like I could spend a lot of time cleaning it up the windows install I think dates back to like — well Windows 7 for sure — it’s been upgraded to Windows 10, but yeah, it probably dates back to like 2000-something I’ll put on screen yeah there we go yeah after so many years Windows just sort of accumulates crap and could use a little bit of a refresh I could install a fresh version of Windows in that machine but if I’m going to start from scratch from my desktop environment might as well start with an upgraded computer as well hence this guy I don’t usually buy pre-made computers from the manufacturer like I said either used or I’ve built a couple of computers recently one Intel one AMD but the reason for this one is that the entire machine cost about the same as just the CPU if I were to buy it retail so that’s to say I got a pretty good deal on the system like basically I pretty much just paid for the CPU and got an entire chassis power supply I’m not going to end up using the Ram or the SSD that’s in here although I can I’ll use them in other systems probably but at the very least for including a decent quality chassis it’s it’s worth it in my opinion I figure worst case if this chassis doesn’t work out for me I can use the CPU with a motherboard that I didn’t have to buy a case I I then have to buy and so forth and it would get a lot more expensive so I’m kind of hoping I can make do with this because this is pretty much the fastest CPU I can afford the reason it was so cheap is because Dell recently came out with the 70 the reason it was so cheap is because Dell recently came out the Precision 7875 which also has a thread Ripper Pro but it’s the 7900 series which oh my God Dell shut the up but you can see this starts at about what I paid for the 7865 but this is only with a 12 core processor if I wanted to upgrade this to the 64 core version well that’s an extra $111,000 and there we get up to $6,800 and if I want to go Max it out the 96 core version we’re talking whopping $22,000 for this machine which is pretty much I think the same chassis that I got here so we’ll take a look at that it looks like maybe a little bit different visually but I’m sure it’s just an upgraded version this with a th000 watt power supply so yeah 22,000 is a little Rich for my blood before any further upgrades so hence this guy the CPU is a little old I’m making this video in 2023 the very end of 2023 and the CPU was released in 2021 so it’s already a couple years old but I usually buy used old high-end like super high-end Hardware when it was new that I get for quite a reasonable price off eBay this is actually the most expensive computer I think I’ve ever bought for myself probably by a decent shot even after upgrades and this of course needs more upgrades because it only has 16 gigs of RAM which is definitely not enough it has a really low-end Nvidia workstation graphics card which was like one of the bare minimum ones that you could throw in there without raising the price so long story short the reason for this video is let’s see what upgrading this machine is like with consumer Parts particularly with consumer graphics cards because this is meant to be used with the professional workstation style graphics cards which are used usually way more expensive and not as performant as the consumer grade style I mean there’s other advantages to buying them that’s why companies do buy them for support and stability higher manufacturing defect rates or lower manufacturing defect rates I should say generally just more stable and they’re a little more conservative in order to achieve that stability as far as performance goes so the huge issue is that this chassis is not very big I mean as precision workstations go I mean they make smaller ones which are sort of like meant to be size optimized this is sort of the size of a standard desktop Tower and like the 7920 series is substantially wider and I think a little bit taller too it’ll hold a lot more pcie cards it’ll hold more internal discs you know 3.5 in or 2.5 and it’s just they’re just generally more robust systems this is kind of I mean I don’t want to say it’s cheap it’s heavy it feels well made and I’m sure it is cuz honestly I I like the Dell Precision line that’s tends to be what I stick with but let’s take a look inside and see how it Stacks up on its internals of course it’s just a single lever to open the case and it’s not a key it’s just a simple screw latch so it’s not really for security maybe you could get this with the screw latch as a screw and here is what we get for a money and I’m thinking well just like a car it has this plastic shroud over the main bits that you’d be concerned with although oh interestingly it does have a fan in there it is an act active shroud in that sense so the Fan’s just a separate module underneath we have the CPU heat sink of course which is huge I think this CPU has a 240 watt maximum power distribution dissipation eight Ram slots this uses ddr4 like I said the CPU is a couple years old so it’s not up to the ddr5 spec which is unfortunate but again for the price I just couldn’t resist an Nvidia T1000 graphics card which is really small and cheap this actually wasn’t the minimum card that was specked with the computer if you ordered it just as is basically but oh it actually has a little protective film over the fan which is kind of dumb cuz won’t that throw the fan out of balance cuz it’s got a little tab anyway whatever I think the default card this came with was an AMD card I’m going to be putting an Nvidia card in here and I’m going to try to use this as a second graphics card just for a couple of secondary monitors it’s got four mini display ports I think it has 8 gigs of RAM which isn’t too bad so obviously not for performance but just for resolution this will be able to power a couple of my other large high resolution screens with no problem as long as I’m not using it for anything that requires performance while we’re in here the other add-in card is a thunderbolt card I think it’s Thunderbolt 3 wow that does not want to come out okay well yeah it’s going to have to come out eventually anyway it’s got a display port Loop through and two Thunderbolt ports which are the USBC style physical ports so I’m probably not going to use this but it was like a $20 add-on and I figured maybe I’ll use it so just get it in case I probably won’t have enough slots for it and I’ll show you what I mean shortly when we try to put the graphics card in here and speaking of trying to put a graphics card in here so you can see the inside pretty well you can see my hands are coming out way Overexposed sorry about that but it’s not very bright inside the chassis and I want to make sure you can see what we’re talking about here and so here’s the deal pretty much all all workstation grade professional grade graphics cards take up two slots so they’ll cut they’ll be plugged into this slot electrically and physically cover this slot and then this slot would be free you could plug the second graphics card in here and it would cover this slot leaving the one in the middle as the only one accessible now the problem is consumer graphics cards as we all know have gotten huge I mean they’re bigger than some motherboards right at least with the fans and the Shroud and everything around it so the card that I got for this is going to take up 2.5 slots so it’ll take up this one this one and this one I believe and so it’ll come out to about here which probably won’t allow this slot to be used because that would cover up at least one of the fans in the graphics card not desirable for obvious reasons I wish we could get like 40 80s even or even 407s with squirrel cage fans just like this one but they seem to have dropped that option from the consumer range but almost all workstation cards are arranged like that and the advantage of those is you can completely block the front of the card up to about like here where the fan would then be here and also I like those better because they pull air through the card and out the back of the case whereas consumer graphics cards unless you have a water block on them tend to just throw air around the case and and rely on the case fans to push the air out anyway that’s enough of my rant there there what I want to look at though is that Dill did thoughtfully provide a bunch of 8 Pin power headers here four of them as a matter of fact and good cable management and that they plug into this plastic shroud in the front just to keep them out of the way and they are wired through this wiring Chase and they have a decent amount of slack on them too so presumably they’ll be able to reach wherever the graphics cards happen to plug in or happen to have their Power sockets the main downside with this chassis is that if I get the old measuring tape and I measure from this slot out to here you can see this just about 30 and 1 12 CM or just about 1 foot to this plastic piece here so if your graphics card is longer than that that might be a problem although it can be a bit longer because this plastic piece can be removed this is what holds the GPU power supplies in or GPU power connectors in and otherwise it doesn’t really have much utility as far as I can see it also has the cable guide here but that’s not technically needed and also I rather like the idea of taking it out because there’s this giant fan in the front of the case pushing air across all the pcie slots and I’m sure Dell Design This properly from a thermal standpoint and from an air flow standpoint but you can see this shroud does actually cover about almost half of the fan maybe just a little over a third and while it allows a decent amount of air flow less so if you have the connectors plugged in here and you can see there’s a lot of plastic in the way so I don’t know just on my own ter terms I would say omit this again with workstation gpus they’re going to be pulling air through the case for you so it’s less relevant that you have good air flow from that fan but yeah it just seems like sensible thing to do to remove that and then with that bracket removed let me just get these out of here because I’m going to be taking them out anyway when I upgrade this thing just so they don’t fall back into the case and so with that plastic piece removed you can see is about 33 cm of clearance 13 in between the chassis and the fan so that is the longest graphics card you could put in here at least without removing the fan which I wouldn’t advise and that presented a real conundrum for me because as you can see I looked at all these different video cards well and then some and I was looking at their specs mostly the card dimensions and like you can see this one’s 13.06 in which should just about fit there but this is probably one of the 480s I was looking at yeah all the 490s I looked at were just too long so I ended up looking at 408s this one’s a 90 and we can see the card dimensions are 348.50 mm or thereabouts to work with so this card would just not fit in the chassis and that was the case with all the 490s I looked at so 490 is just not compatible with this chassis the other issue is 490s currently priced around the 27 $2,800 Mark I mean you could find them sometimes with deals a little bit cheaper but not much and then if we compare that to 480s they’re selling more closer to the $1,500 Mark and I don’t know for that extra upgrade some people are definitely going to find it worth it and I mean it’s an expensive system in the first place so it’s like why not spend the extra money I just can’t bring myself to spend an extra roughly $12 $100 or more on that upgrade from a 480 to a 490 you know it’s not that big of an upgrade but to spend almost double the price of the card over again just for that small incremental increase I’m going to stick with a 4080 and not just any 4080 this one in particular which I believe should fit the Chassy based on its specs though we will see for sure the box kind of fits so you’d think the card would fit but we’ll get to that very shortly obviously this is a PNY and yeah nothing terribly exciting about it other than that I mostly bought it for size which I know is a weird reason to buy a graphics card but again my other option was 4090 new case new PSU new motherboard and then pop this CPU into that other system but then between the case the motherboard and a high High wattage PSU we’re talking like another I don’t know 1,500 bucks or so probably more and yeah and that’s with the 490s so then we’re talking an extra $33,000 almost with the card upgrade and the motherboard and the fan and the PSU rather and the fans for the case and the case itself yeah so I’m going to try to stick with this chassis but like I said the other main problem with this chassis or rather with the mother board specifically is that it can really hold that graphics card and then maybe I could put a card in this slot maybe and then it leaves one more slot free for sure and by the way these are both 16 Lane and these are all eight Lane so it’s a good motherboard in that sense that these are all you know very usable slots in the theory but in practice not so much this chassis is just too small it’s too tight I don’t like that aspect of it it’s not ideal but it’s kind of what I’m here working with and there is one other card I absolutely need to put in this chassis and that is this 10 gbit fiber network card it’s an Intel yeah that and this is it’s fresh from eBay it’s still sealed from the seller so let’s hope it’s genuine it came from reputable seller I’m assuming it will be because this chassis and this is a bit embarrassing that we haven’t looked at the back yet so let’s do that I mean honestly when I’m looking at eBay photos the very first thing I look for is the back of a computer because you can kind of see how dusty it is how dented it is and of course what adding cards it might have and what other ports it might have so as you can see this is actually stubbed out for PS2 and seral I didn’t see those options when I bought it but and it actually has 1 gbit and 10 gbit ethernet ports but obviously these are rj45s this is for copper and unfortunately the only 10 gig ports I have on my switch are fiber so yeah need a fiber capable card to go in here with an SFP and indeed that’s what we’ll do otherwise nothing very interesting three USBC ports I think USB 3.2 and USB type A is also 3.2 audio out and the power connector is the only unusual thing here I mean some of you will be familiar with this but that is the power connector and a standard shall we say computer power cable connector looks like this and that’s what that looks like and so just for your reference if you’re not familiar with it that is an IEC c19 power connector and it’s just generally chunkier squared off and has all the pins in this horizontal orientation and so here’s the c19 the mating connector is called the C20 and the main issue here here is that it has a current carrying capacity of 16 amps if we go back up to the connector we’re all familiar with the C13 which is the standard sort of computer style power supply connector and it’s mating c14 which would be on the power supply which looks like this you could see its Max rated amps is 10 and for this system that’s an issue because I upgraded this to a 1350 wat power supply whereas by default it comes with a th000 watt power supply and a standard 10 amp connector and just for your reference 1350 Watts divided 120 volts is 11.25 amps which is why this power supply could not be used with a C13 or rather c14 power connector because it technically would go over that specification I believe I’ve seen power supplies with a c14 connector that go over the allowed like that are even 1500 watts but technically that wouldn’t be allowed of course Dell is a large reputable manufacturer so they’re going to stick with the [Music] specifications so and of course you know this kind of power connector can be inconvenient for some people because if you don’t have a lot of these spare cables lying around you got to use the one that Dell sends you which you know this one’s pretty long I think it’s 10t but the other issue is if you were to use a standard c-13 style connector most of those power cables have a really small wire gauge like this one looks nice and thick it looks chunky but this is 18 gauge or 824 Square millim for the conductor sizes so this is not very robust I wouldn’t want to plug this into a High wattage power supply but this cable should be quite a bit thicker and yeah indeed this is 14 gaug gauge or well it doesn’t give it in square millim oh it does or 2.08 mm squar and this at least in the North American Market a 14 gauge cable would be rated for 15 amps so 11 Point whatever amps it was will be well within the current caring capacity of this cable so you do have to watch out for that and you got to watch out for that in general like you see a standard computer power cable with this standard connector you think oh well if I could plug it in surely it’ll work fine but some of these cables are very cheaply made they might even have aluminum conductors they might be very tiny conductors they might be lying about the size of the conductors on the cable sheath so if you’re ever dealing with a high wattage load even if it has a c14 power connector please please use high quality power cables in your high performance desktop systems because your fire alarms will thank you and before I upgrade it let’s look at the front that would be important to show you I suppose I’m got to look in the monitor to see where my hands are it’s got two Flex Bays which in this case just hold basic Drive sleds these are the configurable kind where you put a 3.5 in drive in here if you just lower this this folds out of the way or gets removed and yeah these pins you basically bend it sideways slot the drive into these pins and then bend it in and it’ll hold either a 2.5 in Drive using moving these blue pins to this Lo in this location and then moving this one over to here and I think this one to here as well anyway you can reconfigure all these to hold a 2.5 in disc or a 3.5 in I was a little disappointed actually I wasn’t familiar with their flex phaye but I it was disappointing cuz inside of the chassis is just a SAS connector which will hold which will handle SAS and SATA physically and electrically I suppose I was hoping it would be some kind of like pcie extension because one thing I got off eBay were some used nvme Flex Bay caddies so you can plug an nvme drive into these front Bays but yeah unfortunately I guess you wouldn’t get better than SAS rate speeds at best although it might be it might end up being SATA I don’t know something to test out in the future aside from that we’ve got the power button a headphones button and then USB type a USB type a two USB A’s and two USB C ports also USB 3.2 that’s just a and also I just took this off because something goes in here as well I think maybe just a slot load ROM drive or a you know one of those like laptop style popout tray Optical media drives I don’t really care CU this thing is going to be buried in that in my desk anyway and oh yeah that’s another thing I mean I know a lot of people are into pimping out their computer cases which is cool as hell sometimes like a lot of those look really awesome the thing for me is I don’t care that this looks pretty basic because I have an old school computer desk which was originally designed for CRT monitors but works really well with my setup and this is going to be buried right there in the middle under the desk so I you know I’m never going to see this I mean like unless I’m going under my desk to find a dropped screw I’ll never ever see this thing so yeah it could look like complete ass and I don’t care not to say I don’t like cool looking computer cases but that’s just my situation now what I have been dying to find out is will that 4080 that I bought actually fit in here because sometimes you know tolerances can be a little tighter than you think and yeah well let’s see I guess might as well do a really quick unboxing but yeah there’s really not much in the way of unboxing when it comes to graphics cards because it’s just right there and I mean God damn this thing is huge with the power splitter some paperwork oh a support bracket which probably won’t be usable in this chassis but I did buy my own Amazon sort of generic ass support bracket to keep this from completely B downwards in the chassis and ruining everything and I mean graphics cards are just preposterously huge nowadays I mean it’s like this is a workstation in chassis and this thing is even big compared to it but anyway let me take off the card Edge protector get that out of the way and yeah let’s just before I take off the protective film let’s just see if it actually fits oo that’s tight holy crap I mean the back just barely clears it I mean see that’s what I mean about having to actually test it you can measure it all you want but then like I wouldn’t have thought to measure how far back the card went from the slot in order to see if it hit this fan cage here but okay and I can’t even tell if the card is let me just at least secure it a little bit Yeah the card is seated yeah I mean the card’s so big I couldn’t even tell if it was seated just by doing that you can also see the card is basically make sure I’m focused down there the card is basically touching this plastic bracket for the shroud and actually is the Shroud GNA fit in next to that oh yeah okay that should be fine cool cuz the shroud’s inset from the graphics card wow but it just barely clears in the back I mean there is virtually no space as the measurement said there should barely be any space right there and then unfortunately the graphics card itself is blocking a significant portion of this fan which is kind of stupid and I misspoke before this card is 3.5 slots wide so it is actually covering all but one expansion slot all but one pcie slot and at least until I upgrade my network switch that is going to have to be taken up by the network interface card which is kind of unfortunate because that means I’m not going to be able to use this cheap Nvidia card for my other monitors now this will this GPU does have three display ports and one HDMI port I have five monitors So in theory I could connect four of them to this card and then the fifth one which is Tiny anyway I could just connect via a USBC to actually VGA cuz it’s old and it’s small it’s it’s it’s this one I use it for when amp and videos primarily and then okay so the other thing is I am going to need to use this cable because maybe this is just me not never having a 40 series card but this uses a much smaller form factor like Molex style connector which is actually very unfortunate because as you can see if I turn the computer up and of course unwise to do this without the video card being supported in the front but yeah I’m not going to be able to close the case with this in the way so I’m going to have to get a right angle for this and even then I don’t know if it’ll clear because like there’s really not that much space between the card and the case I mean the card and the case cover so to test this today I’m going to have to run this with the cover open I mean that’s the only option here right yeah I didn’t realize the card would come with it so right I actually bought a The Identical sort of connector adapter splitter whatever ever it’s actually a reverse splitter I guess but yeah it’s the right style of connector this one goes to two 8 Pin female ports and this one two three You probably get away with two I don’t know but yes so this one actually would be a lot more flexible but I still don’t think it would Flex enough to get the case closed and this one and I believe this one I got worrying about clearance and this should have a right angle connection Conor oh it is the right oh I was one step ahead of myself it is the right style of connector okay I was hoping it would go this way but it actually is oriented this way but that’s okay because I got plenty of cable length here to work with but I still think that might be too fat for the case to close I mean that’s like at the height of the case cover so here’s what we’re going to do not not even going to bother connecting it yet I’m just going to tuck these cables out of the way grab the case cover and nope oh you got to be kidding me this middle piece that sticks out right here which is called the pcie holder pretty yeah that is pretty ironic that bracket is called the pcie holder which I’m sure would hold PCI cards it probably you know has a plastic plastic things that would stick out and hold the cards I think it would close without this in place now it just looks like it’s spot welded in a few locations so I can probably break that off cuz the irony is the pcie holder is actually preventing me from using the PCI slot that’s that’s just brilliant I mean it’s not Dell’s fault I can’t badmouth them for that because you know you’re not supposed to use consumer graphics cards in this in this machine but it’s just a shame like that they really don’t want you to oh actually ah I didn’t realize no this piece of metal here the pcie holder is hitting the power connector before it can even close far enough for this piece which is labeled the EnV link holder which will then probably impact the card itself it might just clear it but I don’t know so before I start trying to remove those things let’s see if the case closes without the power connector oh okay pH it does clear it okay that is actually awesome news I mean it must be I mean I’m not going to be able to get a camera in there but like there has to be less than a millimeter between this well and now this that one’s a little higher actually the NV link holder is a little higher yeah there’s got to be less than a millimeter of clearance between that and the top of the card I mean it’s super tight but yeah so okay if I can remove this with a bit of force then maybe it’ll close on top of that power connector all right all right you guys all know the famous saying the wrong tool for the wrong job you know don’t try this at home I’m kind of hoping this is like poorly attached but I kind of doubt it because it’s probably a really well-made chassis cuz sometimes I mean if it’s bad spot welding you can just pop it off with a little bit of effort but I also don’t want to bend the whole case which I’m going to do a few fing later okay so I’m here at the other side of the basement using my cell phone much less professional next to the washing machine and the utility sink and boiler and this is just a random set of metric drill bits that I have that I don’t care if I ruin they’re not metal bits specifically but yeah I’m going to use a small small one just trying to get those spot welds drilled out hopefully not penetrating through the other side of the case so yeah let’s see how that goes and obviously I’m doing it over the sink so I can just brush any metal dust and the shavings into the sink and make it the drains problem so fortunately these these drill bits have a very sharp point so it should fit into that spot Weld and sort of hold it in place I should probably use some lubricant actually maybe even a smaller drill bit like why am I trying to push that hard through it all right so yeah I’m going to use this smaller bit there’s the comparative size and hopefully it’ll just be enough to break the spot weld I just really don’t want to go through this side of the case obviously let’s oh yeah there we go movement okay so that that spot weld is defeated so this tiny drill bit should do the trick it’s kind of good I guess that these aren’t real metal cutting bits and they’re kind of dull oh there we go that just popped yep I got just far enough to loosen that up all right so that side is all drilled out and that’s moving and then I drilled these just enough I’m hoping I can just lift this and it’ll sort of pop off nope okay not there yet aha there we go my only other piece of advice when doing this sort of thing which you know I’ve actually done in one form or another on a few occasions is is you want to make sure all the metal dust is gone from whatever you’re putting back on your computer for obvious reasons I mean even just one tiny Speck of metal particulate in a pcie slot for example could short something out and really make things unpleasant for you and be nearly impossible to debug because you’re almost probably never going to see it and you’re just going to think the motherboard’s dead or could short out any other connector or tracks or some other thing so I’m going to give this a full wipe down cuz also that that those metal particulates especially when that thing snapped off could have flown you know over here over here you know it could be under here so can give this a good shake out over the sink and just try to make sure I dislodge everything and then give it a real good wipe down obviously with just a damp cloth with water and yeah again and obviously you don’t want to do this over or anywhere near the actual Electronics because you could end up brushing metal particulates into it anyway you got the idea so let me do that and we’ll get back to the bench okay and we’re back and by the way I mean metal particular to no joke I mean the shavings from that drilling I also wiped off the other side of the case cover because sometimes they can become magnetic as they’re turned around and stick to metal you know some could get on the underside I also rinsed off my hands to make sure I didn’t have any metal dust or particulates on my hands and I checked my clothes because you know if I move my shirt around over the computer and some Fs in there not good either so should be pretty good as far as that goes now just because I remove that does not mean that this connector will still clear the side of the case this connector may be a little too tall but at least now it should be if it’s close it might be solvable and then I could get a different brand or different model of this connector and hopefully it’ll fit so oh yeah and it looks like there a little bit of flexibility there so it’s not actually touching the connector perfect okay so that was a little bit more of a faast than I was hoping it would be but now at least it looks like this graphics card should be usable got to get your hand your finger like deep in there to unlatch the connector but cool o oh it doesn’t it doesn’t have a latch I’m an idiot it’s just the card’s so tight in there and I mean I say card but this is like the actual PCB of this graphics card is that big it extends to where my two fingers are the rest of this is all heat sink like from here out is all heat sink and you know of course cage and fan of course like the actual graphics card itself is pretty small and I should discuss the elephant in the room obviously I could water cool this there is a I was eyeing this $490 which is actually oh $2,200 that’s actually a decent price at least compared to what it was and obviously this would be a decent solution because it’s physically a lot smaller for the card but it’s like where am I going to put the radiator on this chassis there’s there’s just really no practical place to put a radiator other than on the outside of the chassis or like really Jerry rigged in there and I didn’t want to go that route I know it’s going to be disappointing and even innan to some people but but there you have it nice big fat graphics card the other concern is that this this card will be almost completely obscuring these two heat sinks one of which I actually need to access before I put the graphics card in and so that’s not necessarily great although the graphics card itself might draw air past those because the heat sink is the fins are oriented this way vertically when it’s in the chassis and so that should be moving air across these two heat sinks under there hopefully put the graphics card out of the way and let’s talk about another upgrade that’s going to be done to this machine it comes I think with a 256 gig low performance SSD and what I’m going to be putting into it instead are two Western Digital black SN 850x nvmes 4 terabytes a piece because this has two nvme slots under this I say slot connector whatever under this heat sink oh they are captive screws at least and it even has thermal pads on it which is nice and it should squeeze the ssds nicely between this heat sink and other thermal pads below them oh my God this is a really tiny SSD I mean it’s got to like have what one flash chip oh that’s so cute if you can make it out those are the markings 256 gig right up there and yeah very tiny and then I’m going to have to move this stand off because these are going to be ful length form factor and then as far as unboxings go yeah nvme ssds not all that exciting we already know the specs but you can see the size of it it’s got two flash chips in the back two flash chips in the front and then a controller chip up here now at the time I’m making this video I could not get eight TB versions of these but I’m assuming you could fit 8 terabytes in this form factor in today’s technology because well why wouldn’t you I mean there’s only two chips on this on each side I mean and you could fit four on each side I believe I actually don’t know why I’m screw I need to screw this down because the you know what okay there’s an issue here yeah I don’t like that this is going to seem bizarre but I’m not going to screw the SSD in unless that’s going to conform because here’s the problem it has this big fat thermal transfer pad underneath it and the problem is the pad in order to get contact with the underside the SSD is thicker than it needs to be because it’ll compress down the problem is that with the SSD secured in the connector and on and by that screw it’s being secured at both ends and the middle is getting put pushed up by that pad and so I could see the card visibly bowing you know it’s supposed to be straight it was going like this it was bending up in the middle and that’s not good I mean one these BGA Mount chips could just pop right off of there right so I figure I’m not going to screw it down it’s going to be squeezed between these thermal pads right you can see where the other SSD put an indent in that one in theory I should get a new pad but I think will be okay and the other the one ones down there are a lot thicker they’re about three times as thick as these pads so once the ssds are squeezed between this heat sink module and and the lower heat transfer pads these s these ssds aren’t going anywhere so I’m not going to screw them down right now I’m not going to screw them down at all actually because this will hold them in place and when I tighten this down it’ll ensure that there’s even pressure along the whole length of the SSD and it’s not like they’ll be able to slide out of position or out of shape or anything look I don’t know I suppose I can’t really recommend you don’t screw these down because I’m sure it’s not the manufacturer recommended way to do this but and I’m just trying to get those screws lined up because I if I align the screws wrong and then I need to pull the heat sink this way it might pull those connectors out so I’m just trying to to get this as lined up as possible so that it can go straight down clamp down those ssds without moving them and everything should be happy okay now sort of like tighten down the lug nuts on a car tire I didn’t quite do a star pattern like you really you really should do diagonal sides tighten them down a little bit just catch the threads then catch the threads then tighten a little then tighten a little tighten a little tighten a little and basically I went around tightening each screw a little bit at a time just to provide even downward pressure on those pads because they did deform quite a bit I mean you can see that one starting to stick out on the side there where it’s squashed down and it took a decent amount of force to get them down there and you can see the edges of the connectors right there it doesn’t look like these shifted at all during the process and those are not going anywhere even without the screws holding the actual ual cards down those are definitely not not going to just pop out or leave the case somehow so I’m quite satisfied with that I mean those are really well squashed in there okay so that is the SSD upgrade accomplished now I guess before I put the graphics card in let us upgrade the RAM because as I said this came with 16 gab of ram which is not nearly enough for my taste dim socket levers were really tight oh those are some tiny chips but yeah it is these are 8 gigabyte ddr4 PC 3200 a Rd yeah nothing too fancy I think this system does use ECC Ram though or at least I hope it does because that is what I bought from new EG this was super micro branded Ram but it was just a good price and it should work with this system I mean it’s standard specifications I just hope super micro didn’t do something weird oh well they weren’t shy about the packaging and the efficiency thereof three four five 6 7 and eight so this system has eight dim sockets as we can see and I will be making use of all of them and then this is the mo this is the craziest packaging I’ve ever seen Ram coming yeah see this is this is more what I was expecting just eight of these not eight padded boxes but hey when I order Ram I guess I want it to arrive in good condition yeah it’s branded super micro it’s made by Samsung so yeah 64 gig pc4 3200 AA just the same as the other sticks except obviously four times the size and with eight of these that’s going to be 512 gigs in this modest little system and okay that is for sure Overkill even for me but my feeling was I mean the ram compared to the system wasn’t that expensive and I was going to go with at least 256 gig because I have 192 gig in my current system and so it’s like by the time I’m getting 256 gig might as well populate all the sockets and not have to upgrade this beast in the future so that was my logic obviously this should be a physical match for the system cuz it’s just ddr4 pc4 3200 AA so now just the moderately tedious process of unboxing all this RAM and then having to deal with the waste of all those boxes these are not a waste though cuz these I tend to hold on to because well first of all put the two modules that came out of this system into one of those and second of all it seems like I always have Ram laying around that I need to store so as planket would say cure the music Johnny that wasn’t a good planket imitation cure the music Johnny no oh yeah Johnny was captured by white [Music] slavers and there we go okay now in case you’re wondering why I didn’t order this system with 512 gigs of RAM well that’s because let’s just say it wouldn’t be cheap actually I’m kind of curious about how much more it would have cost but so this is a 7865 Configuration utility wizard whatever they call it and let’s see okay that’s for 4 * 128 gig this is for 8 time 64 which is what I got and oh we can get it with up to a terabyte but yeah $7500 I’m pretty sure from new EG I spent $12 $100 on this Ram so I would absolutely never I never ever upgrade ram from Dell I always do it myself post facto so much more expensive than upgrading it yourself now of course for businesses for Enterprises the type people are ordering these type of systems usually you know yeah it’s worth it for them it’s easier I guess and more you know reliable like in theory if I ever wanted if I ever need to do a warranty return on this machine I’m going to have to pop this r back in there and I guess maybe hope that D hasn’t seen this video Al I think they’ll honor a warranty if you just upgrade the RAM right they have to right at least I would hope they would all right so the only other piece to resistance is the network card and of course I still didn’t bring a freaking knife over here but who needs a knife when you got a screwdriver come on random eBay seller please be reliable let’s see what this is nice well I haven’t checked the model number but it looks nice okay so it’s an Intel e810 XX vda 2 Data manufacturer 5 2022 so it’s pretty new and as you can see it is a two port card and I already have sfps for it so I didn’t get it with sfps this wasn’t that expensive and yeah I don’t need two ports but it was actually cheaper than a single port version and the reason I got this is I have I have plenty of 10 gbit fiber ether cards but they are all unfortunately pcie Gen 2 or three and this is a Gen 4 card as is of course the bus here yeah in order to take advantage of the full speed of this bus and not throttle the bus down to a lower speed I want to get the appropriate card for it and we can only hope there’s enough air flow over that heat sink but yeah that will be a test for the gods I am sterculius God of feces okay so it’s pretty much just going to be the network card and the massive ass graphics card that takes up half the chassis okay oh actually I’m going to need one of these brackets I was hoping to be able to fit another card in here but I forgot this was three and a half slots wide not two and a half slots wide so that sucks okay then the only other thing I’m going to have to do is this chassis actually has mounting feet on the bottom you can see it doesn’t want to move from the table so you can just leave this flat on your desk which you know is good for graphics cards like this but the real problem is when I turn this up vertically which I’m going to do this end of the graphics card is still pretty heavy and it’s going to start sagging the only thing holding this end of the graphics card from sagging is the pcie slot because it’s basically like pivoting here and trying to Pivot downwards and the PCI slots the only thing holding in place I actually got a computer a couple years ago I think it had I think I bought the computer just because at the time it had a 3070 or 3080 in it and again it was a situation where the computer was on woot and it was priced such that the computer with the graphics card was actually the same price as just getting that graphics card retail at the time so I figured it’s basically a graphics card with a free computer attached so that’s what I did but that thing had been in storage for a little while and possibly from being banged around in shipping the graphics card had sagged so much it actually bent the PCI slot a little bit and it didn’t cause any electrical problems on the motherboard somehow or mechanical problems all right well believe it or not I cannot find the tiny little box that has the graphics card support brackets that I bought from Amazon so that’s okay for now I want to just close up the computer test it make sure it works and then I’ll those will turn up and it’s just basically a little magnetic thing that sticks to the bottom of the case and then is a pole that’s adjustable and can just go under the graphics card here at the end and that’ll just support it so yeah let’s get the GPU cabled up now I don’t necessarily want to tuck these wires down here because they will impede air flow a little bit and possibly foul those fans so I’m going to Route them up over the graphics card and if it’ll do a nice enough Bend radius maybe not I was going to say maybe tuck them into this Drive Bay to keep them out of the way cuz unfortunately cable management sort of becomes an issue here too because this chassis wasn’t really designed for this size card so you know what I’m going to do here let’s pop this drive bay or this drive caddy out and then tuck yeah once I close the case that’ll sort of Sandwich these two connectors right here and then the cables do a nice run around there into the connector and bada bing bada boom I should note and it’s kind of perhaps a bit late in the game for this but there are two large fans in the back of the chassis as well as the one in the front up here and as earlier noted there is a fan here and I should tell you that let me just throw this approximately where it goes just to show you how it all lines up so the Shroud is like this and the Shroud appears to actually do quite a lot so it’s kind of upside down reversed obviously now but you can see there’s a channel here that comes out the side and then there’s this main channel in the middle that’s where the CPU heat sink goes and then that connects out over here and then there’s another channel here there’s this baffle and another air duct here and that’s what goes to this fan and so basically these two channels cool the ram and this channel cools the CPU and the CPU and RAM have these two fans drawing air through these channels and I guess they just need a little extra cooling for this Bank of ram here because then this fan which is oriented like that like this fan is right here it would sit about here in the chassis and that’ll push additional air past this RAM and it probably will also have the effect of drawing air across these Drive Bays I’m guessing oh this not going to shut with these cables in place though ah it’s always something okay and so my point being this shroud is not decorative it’s not like you know I made fun of it before it’s not like the plastic cover on your car’s engine where it’s pretty much useless and just for show that shroud actually does quite a lot as far as airflow routing goes so I’m thinking what I got to do is sort of this is going to be a little Messier but I got to get these connectors sort of out of the way of the Shroud sort of obstructing the air flow of the front fan because they’re all kind of jammed in there I mean maybe if I pull this farther along and can no because this cable Mass here is going to get in the way and yeah I think the only way to do that is going to be to bring them out and have them dive down here it’s not blocking up the fan too much the cables aren’t and the connectors aren’t actually up against the fan they’re kind of out a little bit so we should still get decent air flow there and then these cables can lay flat right across the top there I know some of you are going to be screaming at me like because I’m not using zip ties and not making this all neat and tidy I mean the fact of the matter is I don’t care care it’s going to work it’s going to be fine you see it’s it’s bent up a little there it does not like those cables being routed there okay I mean it closes but it’s it’s pinching the cable slightly which I don’t like all right so these are going to have to sort of go somewhere else out of the way and there’s really not much in the way of options as far as like routing or storing these cables I think see I can’t go over this fan with these cables because that’ll pin that’ll be a pinch point but I think I can maybe stash these next to the [Music] fan kind of a little pocket between the fan and the Drive bracket and whatever this is and then that’ll at least keep those connectors from flopping around yeah I mean it doesn’t help that I added all this extra length to these cables with this adapter and once the Shroud is in there that’s sort of going to lock all those cables into a little cubby area although we don’t want to foul this fan either fortunately that’s got a cover a cage on it or a protective screen on it whatever so yeah that should be fine that’s not going to foul with any of these cables and then let’s get those under there oh yeah that’s fine these are not really pinched they can move moved quite nicely there’s nothing under there now what is it it’s hitting something what the hell is it hitting oh wait this is going to clear it but I didn’t realize see this thing here that sticks out I do believe that’s just touching the graphics card so I might not need a GPU stand I think the cables were just getting in the way a little bit cuz this was was closing before with the card in place so that sort of pivots yeah yeah yeah that’s like barely oh that’s brilliant okay that little Notch is actually going to support the GPU I hardly ever use this camera but this is sort of the idea behind it is for reasons is for situations like this okay that little Notch see it’s kind of going right between GPU and the bottom of the case when the case is closed in position it should it’s just brushing the GPU and it should I keep calling the GPU it’s a graphics card really but I mean you know what I mean it should just be to the side away from the fan so yeah I’m sorry it’s so tight in there that’s a pretty hard place to get a good shot but yeah see it’s so tight like the case just won’t close until unless that Notch sort of just shimmies into position so yeah but case closes like a detective on Christmas Even though it might not be right the case is closed I don’t know if that made sense but whatever you know what I mean okay well now I suppose the time has come to test this out I’m going to plug this into HDMI oh I just realized there’s no operating system on this so we’re basically just going to see the BIOS huh and of course the power connector that Drew so much power when it clicked on even though it actually didn’t turn the computer on just like charge the capacitors internally but it caused lights to flicker I don’t know if you call it that power [Music] on oh there we go okay that is not the mouse okay the man of system memory is changed continue oh actually meant bio setup continue is there’s no OS on this machine right now continue is a dumb Choice oh by the way I should note this is actually my second time trying to make this video I got like a third of the way through it last time didn’t realize my wireless mic died until much after and then kind of gave up on it so I’ve already started up this computer and tested it with the original OS which you can see right now as I’m talking so that’s how I’m familiar with some aspects of the computer in advance oh my God I got a disabled net boot this is it really Waits this long to time out trying to boot up off the network yeah no [ __ ] all right finally it really likes taking its time so there we go BIOS version blah blah blah thread Ripper Pro 595 5995 wx64 core Max clock speed of 4.55 GHz cool it’s detecting all 52 gigs of RAM that is [Music] nice and now before I exit I do have Ubuntu desktop 22.041 installer from that I wrote in 20232 24 so let’s just boot it into a buntu the live image so that we can just make sure this thing [Music] works did you hear that this thing actually has an internal PC speaker which is to say like a you know what I mean not like a Buzzy 8bit driven you know pazo PC speaker type deal I mean it’s an actual speaker connected to the sound card or built-in sound chip which I guess like you could say about a comer 64 you know what I mean actually let’s just load up G parted so that we can see the discs and make sure they’re both detected let’s just scale that up so that you guys can see cuz otherwise yeah so yeah good we see both ssds there I’ve only ever used use gparted in the on the command line so not familiar with that interface now that’s what I like to see come on too many CPU cores to fit on the screen I mean of course these are logical cores it has 64 physical cores but you know that’s still cool memory 14 gig of 540 gig I guess that includes swap well anyway that’s still nice to see yeah I mean cool dumb question but does a live version of auntu come with a like stress test/ performance test type [Music] [Music] deal [Music] [Music] [Music] well anyway you know what it’s getting late even for me cuz as we can see it’s currently 5:20 in the morning and no I did not wake wake up to make this video I’m still up so all right I guess I’ll be back with a more that’ll shoot another day showing the computer with like drivers and shite installed and it working properly no you know what I’m going to call this a wrap for this YouTube video Even though I would like to get Windows loaded on here all the drivers run some performance tests and blah blah blah I think I accomplished what I wanted to here which was showing you that it is possible to put a RTX 4080 in this system not a 490 because every single 490 I looked at would have been too long this was just about the shortest 4080 I could even find upgraded to 512 gigs of RAM upgraded to 8 terabytes total of ssds and yeah it is now a fairly complete system oh and 10 gig fiber network card can’t forget that that’s kind of what I wanted to show there’s plenty of other websites and videos about this exact system but none of them really went into trying to use this from a gamer SL performance consumer standpoint because at the time this came out spec like this with this CPU this system probably would have cost5 $20,000 so it was well Out Of Reach of anyone using this for home use most likely it’s still a little on the pricey side I’m like kind of all nervous at having spent this much on a computer it’s the first time I’ve ever spent this much on a computer in total yeah it should be it should be a lot smoother a lot faster a lot nicer to use than my current system and I’m kind of excited to get this in my desk and loaded up and working so thanks for watching I’ve been Scott if you have any questions or observations or if I got anything wrong please post in the comments let me know follow me on social media is not for no reason but because if I remember and if I don’t and you want to have more information you can you know tag me in a post or something trying to prompt me to upload some more information about this machine and how it’s working performance- wise like I’ll run a couple of performance tests on it and oh my God I already did performance tests on this machine but I just did it without sound so yeah here’s how it performed I should Benchmark the whole system as is right now anyway like I said thanks for watching let me stop rambling and go to bed bye or whatever I’m always so [ __ ] shitty at ending YouTube videos oh and my leg fell asleep like completely God damn I can’t even move it out from under me oh wow this is embarrassing I’m sitting like cross-legged well one leg’s crossed under the other one which is straight I can’t show you but the leg that’s underneath is completely asleep and I can’t oh there we go I couldn’t even like move it out from under whatever good night what with this salute who salutes at the end of a YouTube video that’s so stupid where’s my slate uh

For home or low-demand virtualization, you can’t beat the Dell R905 for price. Consider that, as of the time I’m writing this post, you can get an R905 like I did with 128 GB of RAM for about $960. That’s only a little more than the cost of the RAM!

That machine has 4x AMD Opteron 8356 quad-core CPUs @ 2.3Ghz and two built-in 10gbps ethernet ports (plus 2 gigabit ports), a PERC6i controller, dual PSUs, and a full enterprise DRAC. It’s a little old, but you can’t get those specs in any other machine in a nearby price range. (OK, the R900 and the HP DL580 are very similar in spec and sometimes comparably priced).

I chose an R905 in part because it only has 4 big 120mm fans (in redundant pairs). Larger and fewer fans generally makes for a quieter machine, and sometimes this enterprise hardware can get awfully loud. I was really lucky when I got it racked and found that it was indeed very quiet. Small office quiet, even under moderate load and in a 79F degree room. (I think the fans were spinning somewhere around 2000 RPM).

It all fell apart though when I added a PERC6/E to support an HP MSA70 DAS to supplement the R905’s measly 8 2.5″ hot-swap drive bays. For some reason the BMC (which monitors and controls the fans, amongst other things) decided that the PERC6/E was the last straw and started running the fans at 5175 RPM constantly. And that is most certainly not quiet.

After assessing my options, I decided to modify the fans. I didn’t have a solid plan, but I figured that some 555 timers, a few capacitors and resistors could change the tachometer signal coming out of the fan to trick the BMC into thinking that the fan was spinning faster than it actually was. Of course, I didn’t want to make these modifications on the only four fans I had on hand — the four that were actually keeping the system cool — so I decided to buy another four from eBay. They were only $40 all-in!

One eBay listing in particular caught my eye. It said “Buyer may receive a fan produced by one of 6 different manufacturers (see picture below). But, no matter who the manufacturer is, the fan is guaranteed!!” The manufacturers included Delta, NMB, Nidec, and JMC/Datech. And interestingly enough, from the pictures it looked like the different brands had different blade configurations.

Images borrowed from the auction page of red_planet_trading on eBay

My system originally came with Nidec UltraFlo fans which have 5 steeply canted blades, an airflow rating of 250CFM and a max power draw of 6 Amps. The Delta PFC1212DE fans which I’d ordered had 7 blades with a more shallow cant, an airflow rating of 205CFM and a max power draw of 4.8 Amps:

The Delta fan I ordered. Picture is from the auction listing by steals_an_deals. They shipped quickly and the order went smoothly.

From the specifications (particularly the lower power draw), I surmised that the Delta fans might spin more slowly than the Nidecs to move the same amount of air. On the other hand, the lower CFM rating on the Deltas might mean that they would need to spin faster to keep up with the airflow of the Nidecs. I held off on ordering 555 timers until I could try out the new fans.

Happily, the Deltas are significantly quieter! When the server’s cover is taken off, the fans spool up to maximum RPM. As I hot-swapped each Nidec for a Delta, I could hear the sound decreasing. After putting the cover back on, the fans gradually throttled down and I monitored their speed through Dell OpenManage. When the Deltas hit ~5175 RPM (the speed at which the Nidecs had been running), they were significantly quieter. They eventually leveled off around 4500 RPM and a very tolerable volume (though not as low as prior to adding the PERC6/E).

The moral of the story is this: There are probably many OEM-approved fans out there for your server. Look into their specifications (many times the mfr. will publish sound levels at varying RPMs), and find the most “silent” ones. It’s not always worth it to risk messing up your cooling and burning out your system with custom mods!

Update: Another interesting note from all of this is that the fans made for Dell have 5 wires, whereas on the spec sheets for the generic version of the same fans they only have four wires. The four wires are for power, PWM control, tachometer, and ground. I don’t know why the Dells have the fifth. My guess is that it’s a sense lead so the BMC can identify the fan from amongst the different brands and models. If anyone knows the real answer, please leave a comment!

Background

I recently purchased a Dell BMX blade chassis on eBay that came loaded with ten 2x dual-core, 24GB PE1955 blades.   For a system with 40 cores, 240 GB of RAM and two 16-port gigabit switches in a 7U frame, $2500 was too good to pass up.  Especially since shipping cost me a mere 2 hour round-trip to Brooklyn.

I didn’t really need ten more servers, so I figured I’d sell off 5 or 6 of them (hopefully breaking even on the entire system — the 4GB FB-DIMMs in 6 of the servers is worth $1450 – $1900 alone).  The remaining servers would be all mine!

But I forgot to research the noise!  The chassis screams like a jet engine when powering up.  Even after it settles down to “idle”, with a couple of blades powered up the thing is still as loud as a decent-sized vacuum cleaner!

Research

I searched high and low for solutions to the fan noise.  Not a single search result discussed quieting this system for home use.   The only advice I could find was “don’t buy one”.  Heh.

I didn’t want to swap out fans with slower ones like this guy or this guy did on PowerEdge rack servers.   I don’t mind a little soldering, but there are two problems with that approach when dealing with the blade system:

1. There are 16 fans in the chassis (3 in each of the 4 PSUs, and 2 in each of the 2 fan modules).  That’s a lot of soldering, a lot of fans to buy, and a lot of things to potentially screw up.
2. More importantly, I’m concerned that quieter, slower RPM fans wouldn’t move enough air through the chassis during peak utilization and peak ambient temperatures.  I don’t want to find out the hard way when 5 of my production servers start shutting themselves down during the summer months.

My solution was to hack the DRAC/MC firmware.  The DRAC monitors fan speed and temperature, and I assumed it controlled the fans based upon various sensor readings.  I wanted to change the parameters for fan operation, for example by allowing the fans to run at minimal levels through a broader temperature range.

In fumphering around with a hex editor, looking for any reference to “fan” (hey, you gotta start somewhere), I found this:

So there was a way to control fan speed through the DRAC, without having to modify the firmware!  What I found seemed to be the text for a menu, but of course no such menu is exposed.  (I checked via serial, telnet, and web interface to no avail).

A little more searching, and I found this nugget:

Amongst the text for the “?” (or “help”) command in the DRAC/MC CLI, there was a command I’d never seen before in the help text itself, nor anywhere on Google:  fanctrl.[0, 1, 2 3]

Undocumented Commands

In addition to the fanctrl command, there are quite a few others that don’t appear in the normal help text.  I’ve listed the more intriguing ones below, along with my best guess as to their usage. There are a lot of detailed config commands that you can view in a slightly cleaned up version of the relevant raw data.

Don’t want to/can’t use the console for some reason?  Just go to http://[DRAC IP]/debug_command.htm after logging in and you can execute any command from there and see the output.

Conclusion

My goal was to reduce fan speed  in order to make the Dell blade system usable in my open basement.  Sadly, even with the most throttled of speed that fanctrl has to offer, it’s still too loud for my (and more importantly the wife’s) taste.  The entire system is going up for sale on eBay, minus the chassis.  It’s too expensive to ship it via regular carrier, and lets just say that I have a Visio layout for a basement data room lying around.

If you have a dedicated server room or closet, a Dell 1855/1955 blade system may be the right choice for you for home use so long as you tweak the fanctrl settings and don’t let the system heat up too much.

To the best of my ears’ reckoning, an “untweaked” chassis with 5 powered-on blades makes noise equivalent to a leaf blower with some fans running as low as ~5000 RPM and others at ~10,000 RPM.  On setting “0” (ultra-low, if I’m correct) it’s just a little bit louder than my 10 year-old dryer with some fans at ~2500 RPM and the fastest ones at ~7500 RPM.

If you are going to replace fans, the small ones at the front of the PSUs are generally the fastest, smallest, and loudest.  Unfortunately, there are still 8 of them.  And if any one of them falls below RPM threshold, all the other fans will speed up to compensate.