SSD, NVMe, SATA and RAID5 inside a 7920 Tower

here is a limited space inside the tower chassis. Generally 5 SATA disks are insertable, but 3 of them will be fixed. It will reduce cooling of CPUs.

So the overall tight packing is a bit too much. However, DELL boards seems never allow CPUs working at full power (too tight throttling limits even on SP 5820 units). So you should care only about GPUs; CPUs are already in a degraded state.

>Should I put the two SSD together, inside the Dell ultra Speed X8 

There will be 2 NVME bays left, you can use those. If you check the video, all the PCI board space is used by GPUs, so it will be difficult arranging a PCIe drive there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbglcnRGrGk

If you don't use GPUs, ultraspeed is a well possible option.

NAND disks for scratch is not the best idea, but that's your decision.

You generally can not order it from the website, but DELL's managers can manually make any configuration physically possible by e-mail request/quotation.

>this should be a fast SSD (NVMe)

No hope there. Dell installs vveeeerry cheap drives in precision workstation.
I ordered the fastest available NVME drive, and got a mediocre KIOXIA KGG60PNV1T02 last year. Just imagine what *** they install as a mid-range drives.

BTW, I ordered enterprise SATA drives in mirror, and got two petty Seagate tins. A real disappointment.

So if you have something really fast and reliable, configure the system for the drives, but install the drives themselves from another supplier.

PS.. KIOXIA KXG60PNV1T02.

You know, a TLC NAND used in cheap laptops... They positioned it as the best enterprise NVMe drive available from DELL.

It does not even have a power-fail protective capacitors on board. A joke, not a drive. I have a more reliable samsung SATA SSD in my home media center.

The 7920 tower can support up to 10 hard drives utilizing both front and rear flex bays.  You can install up to 8 NVME drives using Ultra-speed quad/duo adapters.  So the configuration you wanted to build is easily achieved with the T7920 but you also need to take into consideration the type of storage controller, backplane and availability of system PCIe slots.  As for a scratch drive using Ultra-speed duo, it can support the longer size 22110, use the enterprise grade SSD, they will give you extremely high endurance DWPD.

Enjoy building your system.

Hi Guys,

I will have 2x A5000 GPU cards. That would be a pity if the cards don't go as fast as they can.

For the 5x12Tb RAID5 in Linux, looks like I need the Broadcom controler 8440-8i, do you confirm ?

My question is: should the boot drive (Linux) be installed in the ultra-speed card ?

Or it could go with the other disks (as an SATA SSD) in the front of the machine ?

Thanks,

GIA

@Giax1975 , the optional controller for your system is Broadcom 9440-8i, but it already has Intel SATA integrated controller built-in for soft raid.  As for 2 x dual slot graphics, they will leave you limit of the remaining PCIe slot to use.  System OS doesn't need to be on RAID, so it is your preference.  Any plan to use optional storage controller, Dell Ultra-speed drive or thunderbolt will need to be well thought consider the limit amount of slot you have left with.

Hi,

As for the GPU, I will have 2x A5000 that will occupy 4 slots, so there should be two more 16x PCIe available on that motherboard, plus one 8x PCIe.

the ultradell will take one 16x and the Broadcom the 8x, it should be OK.

actually, for RAID5 in Linux, you say that the integrated controller should be enough ?

I have 5 x 12 Tb

GIA

The integrated controller can run 8 ports in your system so it is plenty enough.