Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

The NVMe PCIe lanes are connected to the CM246 chipset, which is in turn connected to the CPU using a DMI 3.0 link:



There are 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes available from the chipset, but the chipset itself is connected to the CPU through DMI 3.0, which has a maximum bandwidth approximately equal to a PCIe 3.0 x4 link, or about 3.94 GB/s. Note that all other peripherals are also attached to the chipset, like USB, SATA, Intel LAN, and Intel Wireless AC, and hence you will not be able to achieve the complete throughput of PCIe 3.0 x4 out of the chipset's PCIe lanes, due to the shared bandwidth.

Therefore, you can still connect several NVMe SSDs in RAID, no problem, but if each SSD alone can saturate a PCIe 3.0 x4 link (like the 970 EVO can), then you have wasted the RAID functionality, and therefore, we have your results of zero throughput improvement, because the DMI 3.0 link is the bottleneck.

If you want to see true improvements by using NVMe over RAID, then you will need something with more raw PCIe lanes altogether: namely, one of the HEDT CPU-chipset combinations like Intel X299, AMD X399, or AMD EPYC.

 

Thanks for the great tutorial - I learned quite a lot! I'm almost tempted to make a spanned volume and soak up all this flash into one logical volume, and present it as a single drive - since I'm never getting more bandwidth than that anyways, resource contention is really a non-issue. It's something to think about.

 

That's a waste of flash storage, though. 6 TB of NVMe, I would just use that as one giant 6 TB drive.

 

A Spanned Volume would give me the full 6TB, but it's an older thing which looks like a bad idea - it will fill physical drives sequentially, which means one drive will get slammed with most of the read write ops. So, Simple Storage Spaces, formatted to ReFS, and then shrink my boot partition to 200GB and format the remaining large partition to ReFS, and done. It will automatically stripe the volume so that writes will get distributed across the media.

 

Damn.... my battery suddenly went from 3.9% wear (which it's been since it was new) to 9.8% wear! It's never been exposed to any elevated temperatures and it's only gone through 15 charge cycles. I also have never express charged it.

Dell this is ridiculous, trying saving money on shoddy quality batteries. What are the details of the Dell battery guarantee? Anything about the number of cycles and wear, or just 1 year warranty?

 

Downside to this is it's going to be basically impossible to access or recover data from the drive using non-Windows tools, if that should ever be needed. (I appreciate being able to mount my drive to access something from Linux occasionally.) You could use the built-in RAID function and just use RAID 0?

 

I'm pretty much an all-Windows shop, and also this laptop is the only device that even has the ability to mount 3 NVME drives at a time, so that situation wouldn't apply here as much. Even with the Raid On, though, I never saw the Control-I prompt for creating the RAID array and I tried pressing it a few times as well during boot a few times, but I had no luck accessing that. I later switched everything to AHCI since the RAID settings can run interference with the Windows NVME drivers. The biggest issue with a RAID 0 array is that a single flash failure would render the entire system unbootable - whereas this way, I am booting directly from my proven Samsung 960 Pro and if anything goes south with the other 3 gumsticks, I can replace it and restore from a backup without redoing my environment.

To be honest, my first thought was to make FreeNAS a local VM that served out the 3 gumsticks in RAIDZ1 or Stripe to an iSCSI. But, since the bandwidth is so limited and that's so complicated to set up, I'll just keep it simple.

 

I think it was mentioned here earlier on this forum, but I'll repeat it here. The latest Quadro drivers that you download from nVidia are not installable on Win 10 Pro for Workstations, as it doesn't detect the operating system correctly. If you install GeForce Experience, then it will download the same driver, but force installation and that works fine. The latest nVidia Quadro driver downloadable from Dell is dated Sept 18th 2018, which actually makes the machine unusable for certain applications that demand the very latest graphics drivers. I just went through the troubleshooting steps with Dell ProSupport, and they were very helpful to pinpoint what was going on. Now, everything is smooth as butter on this machine.

 

There is a bit of a mess with the NVIDIA graphics drivers right now, I'm not sure what is going on with Dell.

There are actually newer drivers than Sept 18th 2018. This one is dated Nov 30 2018.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=6M4KM

This one is dated Feb 27 2019, but it does not work? For my system with Quadro P1000, it claims that no compatible hardware is detected. And it is right, I checked the INF file and the entries for the P1000 are missing. The driver page does list the Quadro P1000 as supported under "Applies to".
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=V9WTP

If you previously had other/older drivers installed (rather from Dell, NVIDIA, or Windows/Windows Update), you might have to uninstall them to get the latest Dell driver to load (the one dated Nov 30 is the one I tried). Dell seems to have switched to "DCH" type drivers for newer ones, but these will not update in-place over "Standard" type drivers, you get a vague error message that complains about GeForce Experience (which you do not even need to install). You can see that NVIDIA offers both "Standard" and "DCH" and you can pick which one you want to download from them in the advanced search.
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

If your application is demanding later graphics drivers than what Dell is offering, you can just get them from NVIDIA at this link. Honestly, it's probably simpler to go this way. NVIDIA offers regular graphics driver updates for all laptop GPUs now, going all the way back to Kepler at the moment.

 

Do you have any model numbers on the 16 GB ECC modules that came installed.