Not your usual request for upgrade suggestions/advice

[Radium_Angel]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 2900 III (tower) that I use as a testbed for various things. It's currently running Ubuntu 14.04LTS.

Long list of specs are there: http://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/products/pedge/it/PE2900_Spec_Sheet_Quad.pdf

Mine is currently outfitted with the following:

 

Twin quad-core Xeon 5430

32GB Registered ECC RAM (because you can never have enough RAM)

1 pair SAS boot drives in RAID 1 (300GB) and 4 more SAS in RAID 5 for a total of 1.5TB

PCIe wireless card

Dual 930watt power supplies (POWER!)

Extra 4 port USB 2.0 card

an nVidia GT 730 in the x8 PCI slot, but I now have all the parts needed to upgrade that card to a GTX 660 or something similar (Space inside is a tad cramped)

DVD/RW in the 5.25" bay (SATA)  and as soon as I shut it down, I'm throwing a spare Blu Ray drive in instead.

 

So, I'm looking at what else I can put into this , pushing the limits of what it can do, so to speak. Money isn't an issue here, it's not my main rig (or even my backup rig, it's just a playbox)

There is a 3.5" slot that would take a floppy, but I was thinking instead of a floppy, put a drive cage in there (they exist, and are cheap enough) that would support twin SSD drives, and use them for some kind of cache drive to supplement the SAS ones. The motherboard only has 2 SATA ports, and one is in use from the DVD/RW, so I was thinking perhaps a PCIe SATA card, but I'm not certain system requirements?

 

My other thought is the recent LTT video on Optane, using it as a cache drive, assuming I could find a PCIe adapter, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS would see it, and the 2900 would recognize it.

My third thought is to max out the RAM, it supports 48GB total, and use part of it as a RAM disk, but every time the server is shut off, the data would be lost so that might not be the best use of the extra RAM.

 

Just some thoughts about pushing the system past what it was designed for, What are your thoughts?

[LtStaffel]

I doubt the 2900 would support optane. If it isn't in the manual, there are no guarantees. You seem to know what you're doing so I trust you can do the proper research to determine if it would be worth trying or not.

[Radium_Angel]

3 minutes ago, LtStaffel said:

ou seem to know what you're doing so I trust you can do the proper research to determine if it would be worth trying or not.

Lots of discussion about Kaby Lake being the earliest CPU supporting it, but then several other people saying it's just NVME drive so it should be processor agnostic and Intel was just pushing for everyone to upgrade, hence asking around.

I'd like to talk with someone who has one in an older (pre Kaby Lake) PC and if it worked or not. My feeling is since it's just SS RAM, it ought to, but I've been wrong before. But on the other hand (you have different fingers) they're cheap enough and assuming I can find a PCIe adaptor, it'd be worth trying. A 16GB unit is under 25$...

[LtStaffel]

2 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Lots of discussion about Kaby Lake being the earliest CPU supporting it, but then several other people saying it's just NVME drive so it should be processor agnostic and Intel was just pushing for everyone to upgrade, hence asking around.

I'd like to talk with someone who has one in an older (pre Kaby Lake) PC and if it worked or not. My feeling is since it's just SS RAM, it ought to, but I've been wrong before. But on the other hand (you have different fingers) they're cheap enough and assuming I can find a PCIe adaptor, it'd be worth trying. A 16GB unit is under 25$...

I'm really interested in what you find about it. I wonder about AMD CPUs too.

[Radium_Angel]

10 minutes ago, LtStaffel said:

I'm really interested in what you find about it. I wonder about AMD CPUs too.

This is from a post on another forum

 

"So I lashed out and got myself a optane memory 32gig. 

I run it on an adapter in a pci-e slot as the samsung 950 512 gig is my main drive, for the record the system is a ryzen 1700 on an asus prime pro.

I also bought primocache.

In a nutshell, I cache all of the drives in the system with the optane and 1gb of memory. Everything is instant now. It does make a diference with windows, even firing up websites is faster than on the 950 alone."

 

So looks like it will run fine on a non-intel system

[LtStaffel]

19 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

This is from a post on another forum

 

"So I lashed out and got myself a optane memory 32gig. 

I run it on an adapter in a pci-e slot as the samsung 950 512 gig is my main drive, for the record the system is a ryzen 1700 on an asus prime pro.

I also bought primocache.

In a nutshell, I cache all of the drives in the system with the optane and 1gb of memory. Everything is instant now. It does make a diference with windows, even firing up websites is faster than on the 950 alone."

 

So looks like it will run fine on a non-intel system

Very cool to know.... I have uses for it