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. :)
 
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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 :)
 
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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. :)
 
:) Am doing so as we speak. Looking for Enterprise used drives seems somewhat like running a gauntlet.
I see some intel dc p4510, but even though they says sas/ssd, I suspect the old machine may not boot from them?
 
Not sure with that specific model. That one seems to be a U.2 drive, which is like a later evolution of SAS that moves to NVMe.

If the SASHBA card you're using supports U.2, then no worries. My one doesn't, instead only supporting up to SAS3.

SAS3 though is plenty fine for my stuff, and I've been getting these. These are literally the Ebay listings I've used, and they're fine with my SAS card:
Note that the 2nd one (Cisco Ascend Gen 2 400GB) has a fatal firmware bug, however the drives from that auction have the firmware fix applied already so all good. I'm currently using a pair as a ZFS boot drive mirror in my main development workstation. :)

Bootup wise, I had to flash the boot roms to my SAS card so the card can be booted from. After that, the computer happily boots from it without issues.

If you haven't bought your SAS card yet, then maybe grab the exact same model I did (literally this Ebay auction)?

It seems to work pretty well, and if you do that then you'll be able to use the exact same firmware images and commands that I did, and are known to work.

If you do decide to go down that path, make sure you contact the vendor beforehand to confirm you'll be getting SAS cables not SATA ones. The ones in that Ebay listing picture are SATA ones, which are not what you want. (that ebay listing was a once off created by them for me, but it looks like more people are showing interest but they haven't updated the cable pic) They've updated the pictures in that Ebay listing now to show the correct cables.

Hopefully that helps? :)
 
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dragonslayr said:
Will look for some drives around 1.8 in size for raid 10 4-drives.
Click to expand...
... and this bit just now sunk in.

Going for ~1.8TB drives, I'd be considering something like these:
That's the Australian Ebay website though. The US one has far more variety. :)
 
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