He’s obviously figured out the correct amount of thermal paste to use.
Hi Tommy. Thank you so much for the kind words! We’re so glad we could help you out.
Have ordered from TMNY 2x now, both times i have had some help with the ordering/configuration process and it went smooth as butter. The prices are amazing and the shipping and quality of the machines I have ordered has been almost near brand new, or at least it looks and runs that way. Highly recommend TMNY!
Thanks for the positive comments below, guys. Much appreciated!
I just want to say you guys are terrific. You stand behind your gear and if a configuration isn’t working, you do whatever it takes to make it right.
Terrific team at TMNY!!
It’s great to see that Mike doesn’t hide in an office away from customers :) Role model leader right there!
Hi Joanne. Thanks for the comment below. It’s me. Hope all is well. Need a vacation to visit sometime!
Not too sure. Hard to tell from the photo of him from the back. But I think I was his Boss on his first part time job after school we hen he was around 14 years old! Is that you, Michael?
Thanks for sharing below, Mike. Good to hear that the 10K and 15K SAS platter drives worked well and could be an alternative to SSDs. 400 movies/70K songs is quite a collection!
Had a Plex server running on a Dell
R510 with server 2012R2 forget the exact processors nothing special. drives were a mix of 10k and 15k sas stored about 400 movies and 70,000 songs it ran great no issues
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for your question. We have only installed some desktop graphics cards in these servers to use HDMI/Display ports. There is actually no documented support for GPU in the R440, but that GPU should work (due to its low power requirement of 50W). However, you’ll likely need a second CPU to enable the full bandwidth.
Hi Mike, I want to put a PCIe GPU card like the half-height single slot Sparkle A310 ECO Intel Arc card inside an R440 for Plex hardware transcoding. I have unsuccessfully tried it using the riser 2 (MC2DD) card, (no riser card) directly in the PCIe X16 slot 3 on the motherboard, and in the internal riser to no avail. After much searching, some says try I need two CPUs or using an 1100W power supply. Have you come across any GPU card that works in the PowerEdge R330/R440?
Hi Mike. Thanks for your question below. The frame of the chassis is the limitation. The R630 has a version that could take one half-height slot and one full-height/full-width slot. From what you describe, it sounds like your R630 chassis is the version that ONLY takes the half-height cards. The good news is that we can often accommodate customers who have specific riser needs when buying PCIe cards from us. Drop us a line at info@techmikeny.com.
Thank you for the information. I do have one question: I have an R630 6 bay that, in it’s current configuration. only accepts half-height PCI cards. Is it possible to replace a riser and allow a full height card?
Thanks for sharing this tip below, Austin. Good to know.
More tips:
If you are in a NIC-connections limited environment, you can piggy back the DRAC onto the LOM NIC. The OS will share the NIC with the DRAC and you can add a separate MAC address reservation for just the DRAC in your DHCP
This is very helpful & thanks a ton for sharing these details. Please update the RAID card details for 15th & 16th Generation Servers.
Great
Thank you
Thanks, MS! That’s why we write these blog posts! : )
Very helpful information, thank you! Didn’t even find this on Dell documentation
Chris, thanks for the comment below. For whatever reason, we almost never receive any R900-series servers in our reseller pipeline. So we are extremely unfamiliar with that model’s features and architecture. That said, we’re going to add it to the post. Thanks again for the catch! P.S. I did a quick look at the R930 specs, and it looks like that model supports Split Backplane as well.
Split mode is also supported on the Dell R920.
I don’t want to see or deal with my electric bill either so I use the auto-pay feature and never see a bill — problem solved :) In actuality, the power consumption is generally low. I only turn on all servers at the same time for short duration performance characterizations (e.g.: 30-60 minutes) and usually only a few times a month. I don’t really notice an increase in my electric costs. A good analogy is owning a top fuel dragster; you probably don’t care how much the fuel costs for a short 4-second 1/4 mile run, even as she burns ~1 gallon of nitromethane per second.
To your comment below, Lee, we were thinking the same thing, hence our question about solar or wind power. I guess you can’t have an off-the-charts homelab without the juice to run it!
I do not want to see the electric bill on #1.
Where can we buy the clips?
Hi Jim. Thanks for asking below. You are not alone in this query and we expect to announce a repair kit soon. You can visit our site periodically or sign-up for our weekly newsletter where we usually announce these types of new kits. Thanks!
Where do we get the clips from?
You got it, Steven. Thanks for the kind words below!
Mike,
The blog emails are quite welcomed many times it confirms my selections and others, provides insight on what might be a better solution.
I realize we aren’t a large customer just wanted you to know I wasn’t MIA and appreciate the information received.
Great info here which prevented me from going HP. Paying for firmware updates is also like paying a car dealer for using your truck you purchased from them to take garbage to the dump. Paying a video card manufacture for driver updates. I’ll stick with purchasing government surplus Dell Servers. Love the fact that you mentioned the Dell Raid Card latch. I have 2x R720XDs that did that exact thing while shipping them to the middle east as movie servers for my Soldiers. Both latches broke!! I now ship them with raid cards removed. Lucky when I turned the server on, that the loose raid card didn’t FRY my server. TYVM for the info. Would LOVE to see these servers benchmarks for some heavy load simulations. See if there is any real performance differences between them.
Thanks for your comment below, pricemc1. We wholeheartedly agree that HPE’s paywall on their firmware updates are poor form and a major ding on their brand. And yeah, for many HomeLab users — even small business users — that subscription cost can be a dealbreaker. We would love to see HPE drop that paywall but we suspect it is such a lucrative revenue stream from their large corporate customers, it will probably never go away.
Agree with your conclusions but have to give the overall win clearly to Dell if your buying these servers for a home lab or second hand business use case. The fact that HPE started charging for certain firmwares is really the main reason why Dell is so much better for these use cases. I should never have to pay for firmwares that fix things. Thats like saying I should pay for recalls on a car. You would never pay your car’s manufacturer to fix things that are defective.
Hey Rogerio, great question. Unfortunately, it is not possible to attach a SAS drive directly to the Xbox One and use it as a common mass storage device for media. You may be able to utilize a compatible SAS to USB adapter to connect the drive to your Xbox. While you can connect a NAS to the Xbox One, Xbox does not have the option for you to use it for game storage (as games would suffer from the latency in retrieving files).
What I’d like to do, if at all possible, is attach a SAS drive to my xbox one at one port as a common mass external storage device (for media), and at the other port to a NAS adapter. Both ports via USB 3.0 of course. And in this way, enable my Xbox one to read from the drive at one port while I’m simultaneously adding media through the other port on the NAS adapter. How can I make this happen?
Woah. Congrats from us on getting it to work! We will say, we wrote this considering the fact that most users don’t have the ability to do all of that; it sounds like it took jumping through quite a few hoops to get there. Props to you, great job!
I got a bargain used SAS disks dirt cheap, under $80 per 8TB, bought 4 of them. Found also a dirt cheap ibm m1215 SAS controller under $50, which I further flashed to IT firmware lsi-9300. $20 SFF-4863 to 4 SAS-8482 cable. Under $400 in total and I got myself 32TB, pretty reliable, server class, personal huge e:\tmp playground. I don’t think SAS drives in desktop is a bad idea at all.
Thanks for reaching out, Murphy. You can connect SAS drives to a PC using a PCI-E SAS based hard drive/RAID controller, however you’ll need to find the cables which have 4 of the all in one SAS connectors on one side and the SFF-8087 connector on the other.
to mike who wrote “Don’t Try This at Home! Why Installing a SAS Drive in a Desktop or Laptop is a Bad Idea”.
I been thinking how to hook up SAS to PC for quit some time until recently I saw a new product “SAS HD docking station” which run under special USB 3 socket on docking station side, and common USB 3 socket on the other end (connection to PC side). Lot of review claim it work like fry. I believe it should work because new technology and demanding. It cost $200 +-
Thanks for the comment below, Dwain. You are correct that SAS drives are faster and more reliable than their SATA counterparts (and they can be cheaper than SATA drives — especially in the refurbished market. So you’ve come to the right place!) As for using an expansion card to use SAS drives in your system — yes, it could work. Under the “What Are My Options” section of the article, adding a SAS controller via PCIe card is listed as a possible option. The caveats are if that card is compatible with your system. Hope that helps and thanks again for the comment!
I have built several computers over the years and I am a computer enthusiast that tries to dive deep into model numbers and specs rather than just looking at the packaging. I have several computers in my house and want to convert one to a NAS/Plex server. It is about 8 years old and has a x170 motherboard with an i5 4 core processor and 12 GB of ram. I have burned the midnight oil on many nights searching NewEgg, Amazon, YouTube, and Google trying to wrap my head around this technology and decide the size and architecture of the drives.
The one thing I came away with was the SAS drives have a much better spec ( double speed and much better reliability) and are competitively prices compared to SATA drives (sometimes even cheaper) . I am not sure why I cannot buy an SAS 2 port card (8 drives max) and match it up with SAS cables for an SAS drive. I have seen where there are cables that go from on SAS port on the card to 4 drives. This sounds perfect. Why not?? You say that you have to find a motherboard with an SAS chip. Will the expansion card not do the same thing?
Skippy, thanks for the comment below. You are right. We were trying to say that the failure rate for SAS drives is lower – but then technically, as you say, MTBF would HIGHER since that is a more extended period until a failure. We have rephrased this sentence to read “a longer Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), and faster data transfer speeds.” Thanks again for the catch and for letting us know!
“a lower Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)” – don’t you want a HIGHER mean time between failure to indicate a device that lasts longer?
Thanks for your question, Fernando. Assuming you’re using a VGA monitor with a VGA cable and you have narrowed down the issue to the server, it could be an issue with PCI cards or RAM. Check to see if the monitor with the same cable functions properly when connected to another system.
When it starts up it shows it loading then it just cuts off after 1 minute. What can be causing this?
Goran, thanks for this great info. That’s a really clever workaround with keeping the VGA as the primary output and then accessing the GPU through the VM. P.S., we also have played around with certain 3rd party graphics cards in Dell servers with mixed results. Thanks for sharing your solution!
I definitely recommend iDRAC Enterprise and HTML5, since that gives you easy access to the machine at all times from anywhere, and no messing around with monitor cables, keyboards, and mouse. I connect to my iDRAC via VPN and can start, maintain, upgrade, install OS, etc…
Fun fact is that my 4 PowerEdge servers all have separate graphics cards, and that works like a charm even if some officially doesn’t support it. That does however switch off the iDRAC virtual console, after POST, since the video output is now generated outside of the Dell hardware. A way around this is to keep the server VGA as your primary display, run a hypervisor (I use Proxmox) and then pass the GPU into a virtual machine, and finally remote desktop into that VM which now render and hardware encode the image.
These are the machines and GPU combinations, in case anyone wants to try it out:
R820 with AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 (less than 75W and is powered by a 16x PCIe slot)
R720 with Nvidia RTX 2070 Super, takes a “special” cable to power from the riser power connector
R730 with Nvidia GT 1030 (less than 75W and is powered by a 16x PCIe slot)
R630 with Nvidia Quadro P2200 (less than 75W and is powered by a 16x PCIe slot)
Thanks for the comment below, Nicholas, and the background on bidirectional flow. We suspect it also has quite a bit to do with VGA’s analog signal converting to HDMI’s digital signal. Really, VGA is the last holdout of the analog video outputs.
I found the issue to be with my VGA/HDMI adapter.
Turns out, these adapters arent always (if ever) bidirectional.
I had bought an adapter that was HDMI to VGA, which doesn’t work when connecting to a VGA output port.
Be sure you’re buying an adapter that has the right flow of data.
I’ve ordered from TechMikeNY a few times over the years and try and get every company I work for to add them as a vendor. Absolutely top notch refurbisher and I love the surprise extras that come with some of the builds. It’s a refreshing change!
— Sean I