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PCIe Bifurcation Frustration with Icy Dock ToughArmor NVMe and 3 PCs

  By Scott • 2024-07-28 , ,
Icy Dock ToughArmor Review and PCIe Bifurcation Thumbnail Image

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 … Continue reading

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Reducing Fan Noise from a Dell PowerEdge R905

  By Scott • 2013-06-08 ,
Images borrowed from the auction page of red_planet_trading on eBay

If you’ve read my blog, you know that I have a quite a few servers in my basement that I use as a home lab environment. 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 … Continue reading

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Quieting Dell PowerEdge 1855/1955 Blade System Chassis Fan Noise: Undocumented DRAC/MC Commands

  By Scott • 2012-01-06 ,
fan_speed_hex

TL;DR: Skip right to the undocumented commands 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!  … Continue reading