HP Z800 Workstation Dual Xeon Six-Core X5650

PatAppleson

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I'm thinking of purchasing a refirbed unit with 48Gigs of Ram. It's Running win64bit os and a Intel 5520 chip set. I want to remove the SAS 300 Gig Drives and use SATA 4TB and Six TB. Will those larger HD's function in a chip set that a little older, like the E5520. Thanks, pat@appleson.com
 
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The larger SATA HDDs will work off of the SAS controllers but I doubt you'd be able to boot from them into Windows. I don't think most manufacturers were using UEFI at that time and Windows absolutely requires UEFI to boot from an HDD larger than 2 TB. You can simply install Windows to the 300 GB SAS drive and then use the 4 and 6 TB drives for bulk data storage though.



No, don't. The LGA1366 units are a BUNCH faster than anything that came in LGA771 with the 5000X chipset. LGA771 was the last hurrah of the hoary old front-side bus which severely crippled performance on multiprocessor systems compared to a modern...
Did you read this document? http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04110962 From page 8:

Supported Components

Up to 5 SATA drives, 5 SAS, drives, or 6 SATA 2.5", Small Form Factor (SFF) drives
If 1st drive is SATA, 2nd drive can be EITHER SATA or SAS
3TB drive is not supported as a boot device.
3TB drives are ONLY supported in positions 2, 3, 4 and 5.
3TB drives must use LSI9260 Controller.
3TB drives are ONLY supported through HP specials and are not standard CTO devices.

 
The larger SATA HDDs will work off of the SAS controllers but I doubt you'd be able to boot from them into Windows. I don't think most manufacturers were using UEFI at that time and Windows absolutely requires UEFI to boot from an HDD larger than 2 TB. You can simply install Windows to the 300 GB SAS drive and then use the 4 and 6 TB drives for bulk data storage though.



No, don't. The LGA1366 units are a BUNCH faster than anything that came in LGA771 with the 5000X chipset. LGA771 was the last hurrah of the hoary old front-side bus which severely crippled performance on multiprocessor systems compared to a modern on-CPU memory controller such as the LGA1366 and later units use. The 5000X chipset also runs hotter than stink as does the expensive, laggy FB-DIMM memory it uses.

As you can guess, I have a file server with two LGA771 Xeon X5260s, a 5000X motherboard, and 12 GB of FB-DIMMs sitting off to my right side. It's not a bad computer but I would trade it in a heartbeat for a dual 1366 system. Or for that matter an AMD dual Socket F or C32 machine.
 
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PatAppleson

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Thanks guys, very interesting
If I do purchase one of these from Evertek, I'll probably put it in a bigger supermicro case I have sitting around. Then Boot from a new 1tb drive Win7 64 Ult. Keep the SAS drives and add some 4 and or 6TB drives for mirrored storage. When I run out of inputs for the HD's then ad one or two Sbya/IO.Crest cards. Everyone complains about those, but I've found them to work very well. Then I'd have a very fast computer on my desktop and wouldn't have to walk into my control room to do many things in video and audio. What do you think?
Merry Christmas
Pat

 

PatAppleson

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Dec 16, 2014
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I know that the 4TB drives will work thru an PCIe Card like Syba/IO crest. I've got them installed in a Win 7 64 Bit Ult on a Supermicro X8DA3 with dual xeon 5670 cpus and E5520 chip set. And even if the 4tb and 6tb drives will only work on a Syba card, that's ok. I figure its a small negative. The big positive is this particular setup from Evertek comes with all that and 48 gigs of ram. As long as it will handle bigger drives 4&6, it's a winner in my book at $1200.00. or I could down size it and get the latest X99 Chipset and board from Gigabyte.

Merry Christmas!
Pat