recommend ssd drives for old Dell T7500

D

dragonslayr

Renowned Member
Mar 5, 2015
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Have 3 old Dell T7500 I'm using for servers. Each with at least 94gig of ecc ram with dual cpu.

Am fine with the cpu's and ram. But the machines are sata/sas II not sata 3.
They also have 3 pcie 2 slots if that's helpful to know.
Using ZFS raid 10.

Looking for advise on upgrading the old enterprise sata drives to used ssd enterprise drives or something of that nature.

Any ideas on improving the disk IO a bit?
 
Definitely. Though it really comes down to what you're wanting to do with the boxes. :)

Personally, I'm a cheap arse that hunts for stuff 2nd hand on Ebay. You can go quite far doing that without spending too much $$$.

I'd probably first look at adding some kind of PCIe SAS card to your systems. I'm using these, but with SAS cables (SFF-8482) for attaching SAS drives rather than the pictured SATA cables:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196397428430

With a SAS card installed, you can then get 2nd hand SAS SSDs from Ebay. The ~400GB ones are especially plentiful, have tonnes of endurance, and play nicely in arrays. Stuff like this are all about US$20 each and would likely have 90%+ of their endurance left:
Here's some 800GB ones, for about US$45 each:
That's just food for thought, without knowing what you're really wanting to do with the systems. :)


Oh, it'd be useful to know what the capabilities of the PCIe slots in the systems are too.

Be aware they'll probably be electrically connected up a bit differently to what the physical slot sizes are. So even if you have (for example) 3 PCIe slots that are x16 in size, it's common that only one is a x16 (electrically), with the others being some mix of x8 and x4. It's worth checking, just in case. :)
 
Last edited:
Found a spec sheet for the T7500, though I'm not sure if there might have been different models of T7500, and thus different spec sheets:

https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent.../Documents/dell_precision_t7500_specsheet.pdf

That one says:

Slots: All full length except for slot 1; one PCI-e x16 Gen 2 wired as x4, two PCIe x16 Gen 2 slots wired as x8; two PCIe x16 Gen 2 graphics slots;
one PCI-X 64bit/100MHz slots with support for 3.3V or universal cards, one PCI 32bit/33MHz 5V slot
Click to expand...

So it sounds like it has:
  • 1x PCIe gen2 x4
  • 2x PCIe gen2 x8
  • 2x PCIe gen2 x16
  • and some other ancient stuff (PCI-X, PCI), probably not worth looking at :)
 
Last edited:
justinclift said:
Definitely. Though it really comes down to what you're wanting to do with the boxes. :)

Personally, I'm a cheap arse that hunts for stuff 2nd hand on Ebay. You can go quite far doing that without spending too much $$$.

I'd probably first look at adding some kind of PCIe SAS card to your systems. I'm using these, but with SAS cables (SFF-8482) for attaching SAS drives rather than the pictured SATA cables:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196397428430

With a SAS card installed, you can then get 2nd hand SAS SSDs from Ebay. The ~400GB ones are especially plentiful, have tonnes of endurance, and play nicely in arrays. Stuff like this are all about US$20 each and would likely have 90%+ of their endurance left:
Here's some 800GB ones, for about US$45 each:
That's just food for thought, without knowing what you're really wanting to do with the systems. :)


Oh, it'd be useful to know what the capabilities of the PCIe slots in the systems are too.

Be aware they'll probably be electrically connected up a bit differently to what the physical slot sizes are. So even if you have (for example) 3 PCIe slots that are x16 in size, it's common that only one is a x16 (electrically), with the others being some mix of x8 and x4. It's worth checking, just in case. :)
Click to expand...
On the same cheapskate page we are :))
Anyway, Just found out about Promox today and have a very novice question here, been tweaking around with a homemade o/s written in assembly and works alright using VBox (vmdk), Qemu (flat/vdi), VMwarePro (vmdk) under Win10 host (ASUS Z170K, Intel i7 6700K, 16GB) and real hardware. Does Proxmox cater for homebrew flavour too ?.
Thanks.
 
Are you meaning as a virtual machine?

Interesting question. Proxmox uses KVM as its virtualisation system, so if the homemade OS runs under KVM then it should work. There's a bunch of options and settings you can muck around with too, so I'd kind of assume "probably". :)
 
justinclift said:
Definitely. Though it really comes down to what you're wanting to do with the boxes. :)

Personally, I'm a cheap arse that hunts for stuff 2nd hand on Ebay. You can go quite far doing that without spending too much $$$.

I'd probably first look at adding some kind of PCIe SAS card to your systems. I'm using these, but with SAS cables (SFF-8482) for attaching SAS drives rather than the pictured SATA cables:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196397428430

With a SAS card installed, you can then get 2nd hand SAS SSDs from Ebay. The ~400GB ones are especially plentiful, have tonnes of endurance, and play nicely in arrays. Stuff like this are all about US$20 each and would likely have 90%+ of their endurance left:
Here's some 800GB ones, for about US$45 each:
That's just food for thought, without knowing what you're really wanting to do with the systems. :)


Oh, it'd be useful to know what the capabilities of the PCIe slots in the systems are too.

Be aware they'll probably be electrically connected up a bit differently to what the physical slot sizes are. So even if you have (for example) 3 PCIe slots that are x16 in size, it's common that only one is a x16 (electrically), with the others being some mix of x8 and x4. It's worth checking, just in case. :)
Click to expand...
Great! Been exploring such an option after I wrote this , but am now WAY glad I sought some ideas here. Looks like I'll be using one of the pcie X8 slots which I'll make sure is wired for that. I get that sas ssd may be the way to go, but wasn't aware of sas/ssd. Sounds like fast and good! :) Will look for some drives around 1.8 in size for raid 10 4-drives..
 
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When you're looking around for drives, make sure to search online for the data sheet for the exact drive and (importantly) do a search for that drive model and the word "firmware".

There have been the occasional models of SAS ssd that get released with buggy firmware (sometimes fatally bad (for the drive)), so if you find people complaining about a particular drive + not being able to download firmware you'll know to move on.

It's not at all common, but best to know about the possibility up front so you can avoid being accidentally caught out. :)
 
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