HP Z600

[Siress]

Hardware RAID requires a physical RAID controller (sometimes integrated into the motherboard [worst], often a PCIe host bus adapter [best]). The intent of RAID is in it's name: Redundant Array of Independent Disks. However, the RAID protocols rely on the drives to tell the controller when data on it is bad. Consumer grade drives, and modern drives in general, do not report bad data. The modern practice is to use the file system itself. This is appropriate because it no longer requires the drive to do anything in order to ensure data integrity of each individual drive and of the array as a whole. The rest of the benefits of RAID are also supported through software, rather than a hardware controller. For ZFS specifically, the storage configuration is referred to as RAIDZ or colloquially as ZPOOL (the name used in CLI).

[Tarsun2]

hmmm interesting stuff.

is there a decent free way to benchmark the CPU

i think Linus talks about blender render and some others. idk, i gotta go back and watch some of his stuff.

i have another dell tower thats a bit newer that i was going to mess with but its locked up pretty tight. (for me at least). Everything is pretty much locked but i was able to get the tower to boot from the CD drive and run Ubuntu. i use Ubuntu to zero out the hard drives (twice), delete any partitions, and then install Linux.
my issue is that i cant delete the loop drive and i cant change the boot sequence in the BIOS.
i have linux on the HDD but cant get it to boot from there as long as the block device is in place.

1st time dealing with a loop/block device like this on a computer thats locked down.

Any recommendations?

[Siress]

typically, disconnect it from all power and devices, find the coin cell battery on the mobo and pop it out. Wait a few hours/days, put it back in, and see if you can get into the BIOS.

[Seajay]

Just an additional point for the RAID stuff... all of the motherboard supported raid is Software and uses the CPU. Any of the hardware is just a chip letting the BIOS communicate with the CPU during boot.
IF you do a RAID you will want an actual RAID card. The good thing is that it will be much smarter and tell you about failures, and the RAID stays with the Card, so you can move it to a new system if you wanted too. They tend to be rather expensive last I looked, $300 area for a quality card.

Dunno what you want to benchmark exactly... if the system will be doing file transfers just setup the system to manage packet size. You can look online for the spec of the CPU which will give you expected performance numbers.

PassMark is a CPU benchmark, or Cinebench R20 for a render test. You'l definitely just want to run stock specs so I guess these would be useful to make sure you are hitting expected performance.

[Siress]

The only relevant CPU benchmark for the use cases' you've mentioned is that of encoding and decoding performance. A good way to do that is to use Handbrake to transcode a typical medial file (H264, AAC). Use the same source file and same settings within Handbrake, then record the time to transcode. The second CPU should reduce the time, which gives you a relative measure of performance for what will likely be your most CPU intensive workload.

[Tarsun2]

mainly sh'ts a giggles...

i dont have a use for any of this. its just to do things and learn a little bit.

i can t find a coin cell on this board anywhere.

its a dell T3610. ill have to search on line.

[Tarsun2]

found it. it was under the RAM ducting.

removed battery and power supply. now we play the waiting game.

[Tarsun2]

no luck

[Siress]

darn. Well do let us know how you resolve it!

[Seajay]

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/e...t-into-windows

https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/precision-t3610-workstation/dellprecisiont3610_om/system-setup?guid=guid-a0100bf3-30e3-471a-8d1a-a77c0e46345f&lang=en-us

Try that?

[Tarsun2]

tried that. no luck.

knowing that the block device was a program and not a physical drive, i figured id be able to reset the computer (in overly vague terms).

what about resetting the motherboard, i thought. and that lead me to CMOS and BIOS resetting. which lead to jumping the coin cell. there are different ways to do this with different boards, i found out. most of the images on line show the jumper right next to the coin cell. this was not the case. sometimes the jumper was simply 2 solder spots right next to each other on the board. i kept looking and looking and found the tech manual for the version board i had. in the schematic was a jumper at the opposite end of the board. labeled password in the manual. this was hidden pretty good. Graphics card had to come out and behind that was a little blue jumper. removed that and reinstalled the G-card. booted up and jumped right into the system settings. dont know what its called but i think it was F4. able to change everything. headed into the BIOS menu and the options were no longer locked. set comp to boot from hdd that has ubuntu on it and "bobs your uncle". now to remove the loop and were golden.

moving forward, i know what to look for.

[Siress]

What is the "loop" you speak of?

[Tarsun2]

this is my first time dealing with it so my understanding is limited.

basically the boot sequence was locked and it would always boot from a 2GB hard drive.
the 2GB hard drive though was not a physical hard drive, just virtual.

it is read only and i was not able to unmount, delete, or change it in any way.

from what ive been reading, its a block device to prevent people from doing what im doing. you need the password to delete the "drive" or change the boot sequence.

the only thing i could do was run linux from the CD and install it on a remote HDD. even with only the remote HDD connected, it would not boot up. it was always looking for the 2GB drive. so i was stuck.

https://www.google.com/search?q=loop+drive+block+device&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS940US940&oq=loop+drive+block+device&aqs=chrome..69i57.4848j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

its actually still there, i just changed the boot sequence.

[Tarsun2]

little update.
since getting in, i was able to change allot of things. It looks like the vender had the computer running very modestly...

i was able to "over clock on demand" and have all the cores active.

looks like theres a 12 core xenon(?) cpu in this thing. maybe ill keep this one and toss the Z600

[Seajay]

That sounds right. Servers run on a cost to watt kind of setup. They don't want to use anymore performance or power than is required to meet a specification to do the task. It's also possible they were using software to manage it further, so the bios setting are to meet a very low power state when not in use.

[Siress]

That's mostly handled through purchasing decisions as hardware and software settings have far less of an impact. My recollection of disabling cores is that it has negligible impact on idle power consumption. Undervolting helps though. I suspect that the disabled cores are a result of resetting the BIOS defaults.

[Tarsun2]

what i really need is a NIC.