Help adding more SSD storage to my Dell machine

[shopper150]

Chaps,
I need some assistance with adding more storage to a Dell Precision 5820 that I have. I used to be very IT savvy, but have recently fallen behind on the latest tech.

The machine I have has the following installed:
414-BBBT : Dell Ultra-Speed Drive Duo PC Ie SSD x8 Card,
403-BBRH : 1 x SATA/SAS HDD install in Flex bay with LSI controller, support 4pcs HDD
403-BBQV : MegaRAID SAS 9440-8i 12Gb/s PC Ie SATA/SAS controller - SW RAID 0, 1,5,10
401-ABJS : M.2 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive
400-AGXX : Internal PCIe SSD (Dell Ultra- Speed Drive)

Firstly, the 256GB that it currently has installed is too small. I'm hoping that it won't be too difficult to clone and replace that drive with a 1TD SSD.

However, I then want to add something like 2 x 1tb SSD's and then perhaps a couple of 4tb hard drives.
I'm unsure how best to do this (I don't really want/need RAID, but it may me. a nice to have.

How relevant are the "414-BBBT : Dell Ultra-Speed Drive Duo PCIe SSD x8 Card," and "403-BBQV : MegaRAID SAS 9440-8i 12Gb/s PCIe SATA/SAS controller - SW RAID 0, 1,5,10" and "400-AGXX : Internal PCIe SSD (Dell Ultra- Speed Drive)" and what do they do?

I may need help with how to install my new proposed drives and also if someone could guide me through the possible drive configurations open to me, I would be most grateful.

[theboss]

It doesn’t matter how tech savvy you are or were - Dell make these very complicated.

Do you know if you have 1 or 2 flex bays in the front?

It sounds like you also have a dual M2 PCI adapter (the ultra speed duo thing)

Do you know if your existing 256GB is in one of the flexbays or in the duo adapter?

You should be able to stick 2 x 3.5 SATA or SAS hard disks in the bottom pair of front bays, but the flash is a little more complicated.

If both of the upper front bays are flex (meaning they have been converted from SAS/SATA to accepting PCI-E NVME) then I would get a pair of M.2 NVME and use those bays. However in the case of my own machine only one bay contains a flash carrier and I would have to buy a conversion kit for the other.

If this is your case too, you’d be better off just using the duo PCI-E adapter and populating it with two identical M.2 NVME.

Also bear in mind there isn’t RAID for NVME by default - not sure if your megaRAID controller can do this or whether you need to buy an additional Intel VROG USB key. Failing either you could always just use Windows storage spaces or dynamic drives to mirror them.

Looking at your email again I think the word flexbay is misleading - it seems likely your machine has the 4 x bays wired for SATA/SAS to the LSI controller and you’d need to use the ultra speed duo adapter to accommodate any NVME.

Edited by theboss on Friday 23 October 22:42

[shopper150]

Hello theboss

Thank you for replying and apologies for the delay in replying.

In answer to your questions:
- I think there are two flex bays in the front. Perhaps even four? They are like hot swappable caddy/bays
- the existing 256gb in is the duo adaptor
- I think I should fit 2 x SATA in the bottom front bays, but I think I would still need some type of adaptor to fit 2.5inch drives.
- I may need to buy conversion kits for the upper bays, I will have a closer look when I get some time to open it up. I’d prefer to have some NVME going on
- just read your last paragraph and am now slightly confused.
- if I put a pair of m.2 NVME in the duo adaptor, I guess I will need to reinstall Windows, that’s not a problem. I want to have a lot of storage/capacity, just need to get my head round what to install. I think I want 2 x 1TB NVME for the OS, perhaps RAID 1 and then I can use SATA drives for other storage.

[theboss]

Apologies for the delay - did you ever get it sorted the way you wanted to?

I had a daily dependency on my machine but now over Christmas I've had a chance to disect it properly and understand all the options as I also need to upgrade my storage.

It's a bloody complicated system that's for sure and the options you have also depend on whether you have an X299 chipset with i9 CPU, or C422 with Xeon-W.

Based on your last response, I think you have the SATA/SAS RAID controller with 4 x SAS/SATA bays in the front and 2 x M.2 NVMe in the 'Ultra Speed Duo' adapter currently populated with a single 256GB SSD

I think that if you want to miror a pair of NVMe in this Ultra Speed Duo, as a boot volume, you need the Intel VROC activation key which is about £120, but there are some caveats to this, for example if you have the X299 chipset VROC only supports a limited range of Intel enterprise SSD products which are either fking expensive (Optane 905P or DC series) or outdated by modern consumer NVMe standards.

In my case I have the C422 / Xeon based system with the top two Front bays turned into PCI-E bays which can accept either M.2 or U.2 NVMe depending on the physical disk carrier used. If I buy the VROC key I can use third party SSD but only from a very limited range of supported drives.

I am thinking of buying the Ultra Speed Quad adapter (ebay shipping from the US) which takes 4 x m.2 drives but could also consider a pair of Optane u.2 drives mirorred with VROC and then use my remaining SATA hot plug bays for some SATA bulk storage.

[shopper150]

Thanks for your reply. I haven't done anything yet and was thinking about getting it sorted in the next few days.
However, based on your reply, it seems supremely complicated (and expensive!).
Do you think there is any possibility of the activation key being provided by Dell as part of the hardware purchase?
A quick Google search brings up some type of hardware key:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-Virtual-RAID-CPU-St...
Some reviews concur with what you advise.

If I buy this, do you think it will be easy(ish) for me to do myself? Or should I try and find a local geek to implement once I buy everything?

Edited by shopper150 on Tuesday 29th December 21:18

[theboss]

Dell will supply a key but I believe any standard one will do from other suppliers. It’s a little dongle which plugs into a port on the motherboard next to the SATA sockets.

I think there may be an option to use intel RST to form an OS volume but not sure if this works with NVMe.

NVMe RAID isn’t your standard run of the mill consumer requirement which is why this stuff seems pretty expensive. The problem for me with VROC is the limited drive support. I have no idea what happens if you try to create a volume with non-supported SSDs.

Alternatively if your priority is performance more than redundancy you can buy any NVMe as your OS volume and not bother mirroring it.

I have m.2 NVMe disks mirrored on my laptop (Lenovo P1 gen2) so will take a look and see what they are using to do this, I have a feeling it’s Intel RST.

Do you know if yours has the X299 or C422 motherboard?

Edited by theboss on Tuesday 29th December 21:26

[shopper150]

The processor is:
Intel Xeon W-2123 (3.6GHz, 3.9 GHz Turbo, 4C, 8.25MB Cache, H T, (120W) ) DDR4-2666)

So I think it's the C422!

[theboss]

Yeah it will be, you can confirm by looking in the bios screen or windows device manager and drilling down to the chipset components.

That gives you the option to use third party SSD on VROC but it’s limited to a short list of enterprise devices like the Samsung PM983 which if you google isn’t a bad piece of flash and will have good performance consistency and endurance but nowhere near the headline transfer rates or IOPs of the latest performance oriented consumer disks.

See https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/...

[theboss]

I've done some further testing which may be of interest. I bought an ultra speed quad PCI-E card and also a second Flex-bay m.2 adapter so I have capacity for 6 x m.2 NMVe in my system now, plus 2 x 2.5 or 3.5 SATA in the remaining hot plug bays.

I was thinking about buying Samsung PM983 from the VROC compatibility list but noticed they are shipped on 22110 sticks which are a size too big for the ultra speed card (up to 2280 only)

So I took a bit of a gamble and bought a VROC standard key and 4 x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB, installed them on the ultra speed card and was able to create an array from them using VROC.

I've stress tested and benchmarked this in various configurations and have settled on a 4-way RAID10 array formatted as 3.5TB which does 13GBps on the sequential read and 6.5GBps on sequential write, so its very fast.

Of course headline sequential transfer rates don't mean much. On 'real world' 4K random I/O at low queue depths the performance is no better, and in fact is slightly worse, than a single stick.... however I've stuck with this as I want the operational redundancy as this is a professional workhorse of a system.

The next question is what to do for my OS drive - I am thinking of installing a pair of Samsung 970 Pro in the Flex bay m.2 adapters and creating a RAID1 volume for OS. I have been contemplating Intel Optane (which is on the VROC list) but they are extremely expensive especially in pairs, and the RAID layer might negate the performance increase.

Note my success of Samsung with VROC is only possible because of the Xeon chipset - the web is full of people with X299 chipsets complaining they can't do this. It seems Intel forces use of their own SSDs on these systems.

Edited by theboss on Monday 25th January 10:52